Northern Ireland Remains a British and Irish problem

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Political elites in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland feel that the Brexit agreement that saw the United Kingdom leave the European Union has exacerbated tensions between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Republicans in the province.

In the late twentieth century, Northern Ireland was marked by one of the most violent civil conflicts in the Western world. This civil war, called “The Troubles,” claimed the lives of over 3,300 people and lasted for three decades.

It finally came to an end with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998. However, a followup to Brexit known as the Northern Ireland Protocol is threatening to undermine many of the GFA's main tenets.

Protestants in Northern Ireland tend to be “Unionist” or “Loyalist,” in the sense of maintaining and strengthening the union with Great Britain. Catholics, on the other hand, tend to be “Nationalist,” seeking to join the Republic of Ireland; thus they are also referred to as “Republican.”

The 2011 census found that 48 per cent of the population in Northern Ireland self-identified as Protestant, and 45 per cent as Catholic. Demographic trends expect that a Catholic majority will emerge soon.

The GFA had many clear mandates, such as a border-free island, a power-sharing executive with devolved powers, and dual British and Irish citizenship for everyone born in Northern Ireland, if requested.

Significantly, a key component of the GFA was the “consent principle,” which allows for the future status of Northern Ireland to be decided by a majority of its citizens, even if they choose to leave the U.K. and join the Irish Republic.

In the 2016 referendum, Brexit was rejected by the people of Northern Ireland, with 55.8 per cent voting to remain.

Since 2016, Catholics have become significantly warmer to the idea of reunification with the Republic of Ireland than they were prior to Brexit. Protestants remain adamant in rejecting it.

Opinion polling in Northern Ireland shows a consistent trend toward growing support for Irish unity. A poll in April 2021 by LucidTalk for the Sunday Times showed support for “yes” to Irish unity at 43 per cent compared to 49 per cent for preserving the status quo.

The post-Brexit deal known as the Northern Ireland Protocol, which went into effect this year, was designed to protect the GFA by ensuring a border would not be introduced on the island of Ireland, since the republic remains in the European Union. It allows Northern Ireland to continue to follow many of the EU rules on trade, and so retaining the “soft” border between it and the Republic.

This was done by creating a notional regulatory border in the Irish Sea. But it has led to additional checks on items moved between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

London feels this creates unnecessary economic difficulties and now wants to alter it. Also, Ulster Protestants are unwavering in demanding that the protocol not change the status of the province as an integral part of the U.K.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has insisted a solution can be found that “protects the peace process, but also guarantees the economic and territorial integrity of the whole United Kingdom.” The EU says it is prepared to be flexible but says the U.K. cannot walk away from its legal obligations.

Meanwhile, there has been renewed unrest in the province. The cities of Londonderry and the capital Belfast were subject to violence over Easter weekend in early April. Protesters burned cars and attacked police, throwing Molotov cocktails and stones.

The hijacking and burning of buses in Newtownards and Newtownabbey in recent weeks has been linked to Loyalist anger. This could get a lot worse if it isn't settled soon.

Northern Ireland's next election is scheduled for May 5, 2022. In the 90-member Stormont Assembly each party is free to designate itself as “nationalist,” “unionist,” or “other.”

It is currently evenly divided between 26 Democratic Unionists and an equal number of Sinn Féin Nationalists.

The third and fourth largest parties in the legislature are, respectively, nationalist and unionist.

The 2022 election may therefore prove to be a monumental moment — especially if a nationalist party were to emerge as the winner for the very first time.

Northern Irish Troubles Remain for U.K.

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Northern Ireland has long been ethnically divided and subject to debilitating intergroup violence. This provides the backdrop to the current dispute between Great Britain and the European Union over the place of the province in a post-Brexit United Kingdom. It may affect the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly on May 5, 2022.

There are two competing and opposing nationalisms in Northern Ireland; one looks to retain its British identity and place as part of the U. K. while the other aims to secure eventual unification with the Republic of Ireland.

These competing visions have bedevilled Northern Ireland since its foundation. Beginning in the 1960s, a civil war, called “The Troubles,” claimed the lives of over 3,300 people and lasted for three decades, before a peace settlement was agreed to by the British and Irish governments and most major parties in 1998.

The Belfast Agreement, which was placed within a wider European Union context, did not solve the question but postponed it for resolution to a later date.

The Brexit referendum in 2016, however, changed the political landscape and opened up old issues of national identity. Brexit was rejected by the people of Northern Ireland, with 55.8 per cent voting to remain, but it passed nationwide.

The terms of the subsequent Northern Ireland Protocol, concluded in December 2020, and specifically the “Irish Sea border,” has fed unease, suspicion, and violence in Protestant Unionist areas, as well as wider questions about trust in the British government.

The Protocol is the part of the Brexit withdrawal from the EU that governs the unique customs and immigration issues at the border on the island of Ireland between the Irish Republic, which remains in the EU, and Northern Ireland.

When Britain was a member of the EU, the border had been largely invisible after 1998, without any physical barrier or custom checks on its many crossing points. However, upon the British withdrawal, the border in Ireland has become the only land border between the U.K. and EU.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is intended to protect the EU single market, while avoiding imposition of a so-called hard border that might incite a recurrence of conflict and destabilise the relative peace that has held since the end of the “Troubles.”

Under the Protocol, Northern Ireland is formally outside the EU single market, but EU free movement of goods and rules still apply; this ensures there are no customs checks or controls between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island.

In place of a land border, the Protocol has created a notional customs border in the Irish Sea for customs purposes, separating Northern Ireland from the rest of Great Britain, to the unease of prominent Unionists, who fear this might be a step to the province becoming a de facto separate entity outside the U.K.

The Protocol has prompted disagreements between the U.K. and EU because it has disrupted trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. British prime minister Boris Johnson contends London has grounds to deploy an emergency clause, Article 16, that permits it to suspend parts of the Protocol.

But the EU sees the current rules as a key part of protecting its single market and believes suspending parts of the deal would be unjustified. It has proposed a package of reforms but the U.K. is seeking more fundamental changes.

Behind all the bluster lie fears about the fragility of peace in the province. Is there a possibility of renewed violence? Such questions are at the centre of Northern Ireland’s public debates since 2016.

The cities of Londonderry and the capital Belfast were subject to violence in early April. The hijacking and burnings of buses in Newtownards and Newtownabbey in recent weeks has been linked to loyalist anger. Unionists argue that the Protocol has upset the delicate balance that the Belfast Agreement created.

Currently the Stormont parliament is divided between nationalists and unionists, with 26 Democratic Unionists and an equal number of Sinn Féin Nationalists. The third and fourth largest parties in the legislature are, respectively, nationalist and unionist.

The 2022 elections may therefore prove to be a monumental moment -- especially if an nationalist party emerges as the electoral winner for the very first time.

Will a Far-Right Candidate Take France’s Presidency?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

French presidential elections are held in two stages. If in the first round no candidate wins an absolute majority, the two leading candidates face one another in the second.

A new poll sees French right-wing pundit Eric Zemmour making it to the second round of the presidential election this coming April along with President Emmanuel Macron, confirming earlier polls that saw Zemmour overtaking far-right leader Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (National Rally).

The chat show star, who has twice been convicted for inciting hatred, has dominated the French airwaves in recent months with provocative comments about Islam, immigrants and women.

Zemmour has now pulled ahead of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (National Rally). A Harris Interactive poll, published Nov. 9, projected Zemmour winning 18-19 per cent of first-round votes, widening the gap over Le Pen, who slipped to 15-16 per cent. Macron remained in the lead, with an unchanged 23-24 per cent.

All this despite the fact that Zemmour does not lead or belong to a political party and has not even officially announced his candidacy. But that is not necessarily a hindrance.

Political parties have often been set up as the vehicles of a politician, and on two occasions during the postwar years it has led to the candidate’s election: Charles de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français (Rally of the French People) and Macron’s own La République en Marche (The Republic On The Move).

Zemmour wants to ban all immigration; he claims Muslims have “colonized” entire swaths of French cities; he considers France to be in a state of civil war with its Muslim population. Islam, for him, is by its nature a religion of terror.

He attacked ex-president Francois Hollande’s migration policy on Nov. 13 during commemorations marking the 2015 attacks by Islamic State on the Bataclan theatre and other locations in Paris, which left 130 people dead.

Zemmour is a proponent of the “great replacement” theory, which purports that the French establishment wants to eventually replace whites with non-European Muslims from Africa and the Middle East.

Of France’s estimated six million Muslims, close to 10 per cent of the population, he has argued they should “be given the choice between Islam and France.” He declared that he would ban all “non-French names,” like Muhammad.

Zemmour’s books, including his latest, La France n’a pas Dit Son Dernier Mot (France Hasn’t Had its Final Word), published this autumn, present a France facing decline, degeneration, and even national suicide by way of leftist ideology and the presence of large immigrant communities.

French universalism for Zemmour is an outgrowth of Christian universalism; and it is Catholicism that is the founding doctrine of the French nation.

This makes him a most unlikely flag-bearer for a far-right candidacy, because Zemmour is a Jew of Algerian ancestry, the son of observant Jews who fled Algeria in 1958 during that country’s war of independence.

Yet in his 2014 bestseller, Le Suicide Français (France’s Suicide), Zemmour asserted that the Vichy government of 1940-1944 that collaborated with the Nazis actually protected French Jews.

“Vichy protected French Jews and gave the foreign Jews,” Zemmour said in September on CNews, a right-wing television channel, suggesting that the wartime government of Marshal Philippe Pétain that sent more than 72,500 Jews to their deaths was not so bad after all.

Zemmour has also reopened the Dreyfus Affair, which rocked France from 1894 until its resolution in 1906, contending last year that the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason, “was not evident.”

“He is dangerous, and he insults Jewish morality,” Bernard-Henri Lévy, a leading Jewish author and intellectual, said in an interview.

“There is a part of the Jewish community that sees in him the man who will resolve problems of security and violent Islamism,” Francis Kalifat, the president-elect of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Council of Jewish Institutions in France), has remarked.

Why does Zemmour make such claims? For Zemmour there is only one France, one of eternal grandeur and glory. He thus despises any form of ethnic particularism and any claims to victimhood at the hands of the French nation.

 

In France, A Most Unlikely Presidential Candidate

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Polls in France have identified a new potential candidate who could break through in next April’s presidential election. The latest surveys show that the French columnist and journalist for Le Figaro, Eric Zemmour, is shaking up the race before it's even begun by taking up all the political energy on the right.

French presidential elections are held in two stages. If in the first round no candidate wins an absolute majority, the two leading candidates face one another in the second.

Zemmour has now pulled ahead of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (National Rally). A Harris Interactive poll, published Nov. 9, projected Zemmour winning 18-19 per cent of first-round votes, widening the gap over Le Pen, who slipped to 15-16 per cent.

If the election were held now, the run-off would include not Le Pen but Zemmour against President Emmanuel Macron.

He is the only right-wing candidate to win the sympathies of two groups that have been split between the Rassemblement National and the liberal-conservative Les Républicains (the Republicans) so far, gathering support both among peripheral classes who had been voting for Le Pen, and the conservative bourgeoisie, which has until now voted for Les Républicains.

His new book La France n’a pas Dit son Dernier Mot (France Hasn’t Said its Final Word) was published recently and serves as his manifesto. A confirmed nationalist, he states that “one must choose the side on which one will fight in the clash of civilizations that is taking place on our soil.”

Zemmour comes from a family of Algerian Jews – not people one expects to support the far right. His father, born in Algeria, admired Charles de Gaulle, and, even though the general had separated Algeria from France, he voted for him with conviction.

Zemmour confesses that he had always regarded the fact that Algeria had been conquered by France, in consequence of which he had been incorporated into the French nation, as “an enormous privilege.”

That is why he watched with such dismay, he writes, how the French suburbs, the banlieu, once full of those who understood the privilege of being French, were changing. Decades of immigration have transformed beyond recognition familiar places where Zemmour grew up. “They ceased to be France,” he maintains.

He is a fervent enemy of the European Union. The Single European Act of 1986, initiated the processes of deindustrialization and relocation that left masses of immigrants unemployed, Zemmour insists, worsening their situation and increasing the tensions between them and the society that received them.

Liberal ideology, according to Zemmour, is one of the major causes of the anomie into which France is descending. For him, protectionism is the only healthy economic policy.

In Zemmour’s view, the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, creating the modern European Union, was when France “said goodbye” to sovereignty, and democracy became largely a façade. A new political divide was born: the political establishment, the media, and the artistic and financial elites, the winners of globalization on one side; on the other its forgotten losers.

The 2005 referendum on the European Constitution sealed the fate of France, for Zemmour. The voters rejected the European Constitution, and the “no” side won. But they were not listened to. President Nicolas Sarkozy would later adopt the Lisbon Treaty without asking the French for their opinion. It was, he maintains, the last nail driven into the coffin of French democracy.

Zammour  sees the European Union as the ultimate expression of the oligarchic tendencies of an elite full of contempt for its own people. It is governed by dignitaries who have not been elected in any way, by officials who feel accountable to no one.

On Islam, Zemmour is uwavering in his view that there is an irremediable clash between French and Islamic civilizations. At a recent rally in the small southern town of Béziers, Zemmour told his audience that France is being “submerged” by migrants, and parents should be forced to give their children “French names.”

As for the French media, he dismissed them as “a propaganda machine” that hates France. “They spit on French history and culture, and they spit on the French people, whom they want to see disappear.” The mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, is politically close to Marine Le Pen and is pressing her to join forces with Zemmour to defeat Macron.

Should this man retain the popularity he now seems to enjoy, 2022 could become a very important year for France. However, unlike during earlier crises in France’s history, there seems no hint that the Fifth Republic itself is in any danger.

During the last years of the Third or Fourth Republics, insurgent movements on the right attacked their very constitutional foundations. But Zemmour (and Le Pen) claim they are defenders of the current constitution, not its subversives.