Partition and the common good

DERMOT ROANTREE [from editorial of Spring 2025 issue of Studies] :: All the catastrophes that befall King Lear begin with his partitioning of a kingdom. Intending to divest himself of ‘cares of state’, Lear calls for a map and proceeds to draw boundary lines across it, dividing it into three portions, one for each of his daughters. Things fall apart then, of course, and he finds himself, at the play’s climax, houseless and all but alone, raging into a great storm against the ingratitude of his daughters. The curse he calls down is intriguing: ‘And thou, all-shaking thunder,’ he roars, ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world’.

What is a map if not the ‘thick rotundity o’ th’ world’ struck flat? It shows you everything – it is, as J.B. Harley has called it in his renowned essay ‘Deconstructing the map’, a ‘spatial panopticon’ – and yet it shows you very little. It is only when Lear is thrown into the real world of his kingdom, a far cry from the notional world of the map, that he comes to a concrete understanding of justice, gains empathy with the poor, and perceives the illusions of power and authority.

If 20th century decolonisation has taught us anything, it is that having one’s country reduced by administrators to a mere map is often indeed a calamitous curse. So many of the architects of the states that gained independence since the First World War did most of their work in the map room and so had no Lear-like illumination. The brutal conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the Biafran War in Nigeria, the Rwandan genocide, the Sudanese civil wars, the oppression of the Kurds, and of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – all of these bear terrible witness to what has been termed ‘the colonial legacy of artificial borders’. They demonstrate the tendency of empires to disregard the ‘thick rotundity’ of the region they administer, the three-dimensional, textured lifeworld of its inhabitants, with its deep history, diverse traditions and cultures, and complex social divisions. When the empire leaves, then, conflict is inevitable.

The more contested borders or partitions are, the more likely it is that conflict will be addressed primarily from the perspective of reasons of state. Sovereignty, national security and geopolitical interests will occupy the foreground, and little regard will be shown for the complex identities, experiences, and aspirations of the inhabitants. But what we have seen in India, Africa and the Middle East – indeed what we are seeing now in Israel and Ukraine – is that reasons of state rarely produce long-lasting solutions. They do little to address historical grievances or to defuse cultural anxieties, and they often exacerbate them. For a solution to last, these top-down considerations have to be aligned with close attentiveness to realities on the ground floor. The common good must come first.

Plenty of bottom-up approaches present themselves: citizen-led dialogue, trust-building initiatives, the sharing of historical narratives, exercises in restorative justice, and so on. But in all this it may be necessary to hold out against a state-centric logic, which tends to be zero-sum – one side must lose for the other side to win. Especially where minority populations are impacted, it is essential, even if it lengthens the process, to ensure the protection of cultural identities, as well as to consider options such as devolution, dual identity, phased transitions, legal guarantees, and symbolic gestures of inclusion. What paying such close attention to the lives of those affected by boundary issues tends to do, given the ineffable complexities of communal living, is to undermine certainties about how conflicts should be resolved and to slow things down, keeping open the possibility of novel or counter-intuitive solutions. Perhaps there’s a general rule of life here: the more attentive one is, the more tentative one will be. And that’s a good thing.

***

The Irish government’s Decade of Centenaries programme ran from 2012, commemorating the Third Home Rule bill of April 1912, to 2023, marking the centenary of the Irish Free State’s admission to the League of Nations in September 1923. The intention was of course to cover all the major events in the foundational period of the state – the Ulster Covenant, the Dublin Lockout, the founding of the Irish Volunteers, the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and so on – and public events during the commemorative decade did so effectively. It must be said, however, that the foundational period extended beyond 1923. Surely it also includes the Boundary Commission debacle of 1924-5, which locked the partition of Ireland into the 26/6 county division, an outcome that led inexorably to civil strife and the bloody sectarian violence of the Troubles. This failure must be commemorated too.

The brief of the commissioners, according to Article 12 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, was to revise the border between North and South ‘in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions’. But each of the terms in this mandate turned out to be problematic, and without doubt other considerations – reasons of state – came into play. When the commission’s report was eventually suppressed, it brought to a dismal end the Irish republican hope that the Treaty would give the nascent state (in the words of Michael Collins) ‘not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it’.

Republican and unionist visions of Ireland, as well as senses of Irishness that are indifferent to centuries-old history, have taken new and more complex shapes in recent decades. This for many reasons – demographic shifts, more complex models of international shared sovereignty, historical distance, and growing disparities between the social and economic fortunes of the two parts of the island, for instance. It remains, therefore, a necessary exercise to reflect again on ‘the wishes of the inhabitants’ of the whole island – to ask ourselves how we see things now, what values we consider paramount, and what actions we believe are needed.