Why have unionists, and particularly the DUP, opposed every effort to ameliorate community relations here from equality legislation to discrimination legislation, human rights legislation, the role of the European Court of Human Rights?
Why have they spurned the effort of the EU to grant an economic advantage to everyone in the north?
Dr Patrick Anderson thinks he can provide at least part of the answer. In his book launched last week at the Féile, ‘Rewriting the Troubles: war and propaganda, Ireland and Algeria’, an extensively researched academic analysis of conflict in the two countries, Anderson attributes unionist intransigence to settler colonialism. Many unionists have long ago shed that laager complex but the DUP and its supporters exemplify the mentality of settler colonialism in all its attitudes, tropes and behaviour.
Unionists, including academics, have been aware of the striking analogies between Algeria and the north for decades: they all reject the uncanny similarities as dangerous. It’s easy to see why. Accepting any analogy or similarity means accepting that the north is illegitimate, a temporary arrangement, and that Britain will eventually leave Ireland as the French did Algeria despite the myth that Algeria was as much a part of metropolitan France as, em, Finchley, no, sorry, Bordeaux. It means also accepting that Ireland was an English colony and that decolonisation, which unionists have resisted for a century by sedition, subversion, rebellion, murder and mayhem, will be completed when the British inevitably leave.
Until the early 1970s when unionists became aware of the hazards of lauding their settler, or planter, origins, their spokespeople readily used the terms. A 1969 Orange Order pamphlet Orangeism, described unionists as “unconquerable colonists” proud of their planter roots. Paisley praised his Ballymena constituents’ work ethic as due to their settler origins. You won’t hear any of that now because of the logical conclusion of such remarks.
However, as Anderson points out, that consciousness of separateness (one of Paisley’s key biblical quotations, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate”), reinforced the settler social structure and required opposing any reforms which treated the whole population equally, thereby altering the dominant settler assumptions. Similarly in Algeria, any attempt by either the French government or the army to improve conditions for everyone in Algeria was vigorously opposed by the colons also known as the pieds noirs. Incidentally, they also had their own local militia just as abhorrent as the UDR.
Another reason to play down the many analogies with Algeria is that the British government more or less accepted the basic thesis of decolonisation in the 1994 Downing Street declaration and of course enshrined it in the Good Friday Agreement. As well as admitting that they have “no selfish strategic or economic reason” for remaining in Ireland, the British agreed that, “it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right of self-determination” in referendums. That can only mean that so far the people of the island have been prevented from exercising their right of self-determination. And we know why and by whom.
There’s no good saying the notion of settler doesn’t apply because the plantation was 400 years ago. As Anderson shows, “Invasion in the settler colonial context is not a specific event but rather a structure…There is no such thing as post-settler colonialism or neo-settler colonialism. It is of the present as well as of the past.” It is the DUP which futilely strives to maintain the structure in the present.
The hopeful signs are that more and more young, educated, professional unionists don’t buy the DUP fearmongering and won’t vote for the antediluvian party. They know from the guarantees they’ve been given in the GFA that they have nothing to fear from changes in the structure of society, that in fact it would be preferable if those structural changes take place.
