Norman Porter

http://nhw.livejournal.com/783046.html

Porter achieved some prominence, briefly, in Northern Ireland's political discourse about ten years ago for his first book, Rethinking Unionism. Since I am not a Unionist, I couldn't get very enthusiastic about his attempts to repackage it, and it seemed to me that while Porter had succeeded in producing an alternative vision which was, indeed, not too far from mine, his project was fatally flawed by insisting on calling this "Unionism" in any form; to my mind, if you aim for a decent civic society, which respects and equally guarantees the rights of all its citizens, that surely is largely irrelevant to the question of whether Northern Ireland should continue to be in the UK, join the rest of Ireland, be somehow shared or become independent (though not irrelevant as to how that issue should be resolved). So for that reason I didn't bother reading the first book, though I was well aware of its arguments.

I'm very glad to say that my friend who insisted on lending me The Elusive Quest was right to do so. Porter has moved on from Unionism, and here presents a devastating critique of both the Unionist and Republican traditions (he spends less time on more moderate Irish nationalists, though does not ignore them entirely). His refutation of the liberal pretensions of Unionism is clear and comprehensive; his attack on the ethics of both sides utterly convincing; and his dissection of the Sinn Fein/IRA attitude to the peace process, based entirely on showing the flaws in its own internal logic, is the best I've read. The book was published in 2003, before it became clear that the UUP had lost the internal battle in Unionism, so some of the commentary on Trimble is now of historical interest only; but his critiques of Unionism in general remain sound.

But this is not a negative book. Those impressive passages attacking both side (near the end) are embedded in a very positive political argument, that the key to building a healthy society is to achieve reconciliation, and that the only criterion worth using to judge the actions of politicians is the extent to which they achieve it. His case is cleverly made, with a thought-provoking matrix of theoretical background and rebuttals of potential opposing arguments. I would have liked a few more specific policy recommendations, but perhaps this is beside the point - the book is about mind-sets, rather than actions.

Inevitably, given my own interests, I've been trying to think of how Porter's arguments could be generalised to the rest of the world. I think the key message is that communication is always necessary and appropriate, and that it is wrong, logically and morally, to assume that you already know in advance what the other side are going to say, so there is no point in talking to them. Indeed, it's a point that is true for life in general, and not just in the politics of divided societies.… (mais)