Brian Feeney: ‘Uniting the community’ is Alliance’s category error

Wolfgang Pauli, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1945, had zero tolerance for balderdash, mathematical or any other kind.

One of his responses when asked for his opinion on a paper produced by a poor postgraduate physics student has become famous. Pauli said: “It’s not even wrong.”

The phrase has come to be applied to arguments or explanations that purport to be sensible but use fallacious reasoning or speculative premises. It’s also called a category error.

Pauli’s judgement applies perfectly to Naomi Long’s attempt to dodge a question from the audience in last week’s BBC NI debate asking what is the point of being in the UK, and criticism that Alliance ‘sit on the fence’ on the topic.

Long replied: “We don’t sit on the fence. We have a strong position. We are in favour of a united community in Northern Ireland. That is our priority policy. We cannot have a united Ireland or a United Kingdom while this place remains divided.”

There you have it. That’s not even wrong. As you can readily see, it’s a category error.

First, it’s a wrong diagnosis of this place. Any political scientist examining the north could not fail to conclude that the British created an artificial sub-polity in the north-east of the Ireland which presents a classic ethno-national or ethno-political problem.

It’s not the only place they did it. Look at the Indian sub-continent and the horrors following British partition in 1947, resulting in 20 million people displaced and, it’s estimated, one million killed. Look at the artificial boundaries the British created in Africa.

The British border in Ireland is the legacy of colonialism, leaving the north the last remnant of England’s first colony. You find similar ethno-national and/or ethno-political divisions right across Europe, where Germany or France or other large states took over parts of neighbouring countries and invented new artificial entities.

Belgium is the classic example but so too was Yugoslavia. Now, does anyone say they’re going to unite the Flemings and Walloons, or even more daft, that there can’t be a united Belgium until the Flemings and Walloons are united?

Does anyone imagine the Serbs and Croats can be united? They speak the same language but write it in different scripts: Roman or Cyrillic. They are divided by Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Does anyone talk about uniting the Muslims of Bosnia with the Serbs of Bosnia?

Then we have Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, another place where the malign hand of the British left a wondrous legacy, eh? And so on and so on.

David Trimble and Seamus Mallon shake hands after being elected First and Deputy First Ministers of a new power-sharing government following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, with Assembly Speaker Lord Alderdice looking on

The Alliance category error is even more astonishing because they support the Good Friday Agreement, whose mechanisms are based on recognition that the north is composed of two main communities with different identities and allegiances. Nevertheless, Alliance never lets the phrase ‘two communities’ cross their lips.

The GFA’s construction was devised following the ideas of consociationalism laid out by Arendt Lijphart to deal with ethno-national and ethno-political divisions. Its allocation of positions is based on the system devised by, of course, a Belgian mathematician, Victor D’Hondt. It guarantees fair dibs for a minority community. QUB gave Lijphart an honorary degree for his work.

In short, “uniting the community in Northern Ireland” as a “policy priority” is not even wrong. The GFA drafters recognised reality. The plan is for both main communities to work together to share the place, not pretend that divided identity and allegiance don’t exist or can be erased. Won’t ever happen.

There are other fundamental flaws in the Alliance (and indeed UUP) position of a ‘united community’. Refusing to accept that two main communities have to be accommodated means refusing to accept equality of status and parity of esteem for nationalists, since they believe nationalists must be subsumed within a non-existent, artificially sustained Norn Irn community. That’s essentially the NIO position too.

Tomorrow you may see Naomi Long decapitate the DUP thanks to tactical voting by Sinn Féin and SDLP voters but what you also see across the north is 80% of voters supporting candidates from two ethno-national communities

Another consequence of Alliance’s refusal to engage in the national question is that they are telling people here they can never elect a government, never exercise self-determination, which they can do only in a reunited Ireland.

Instead, they only offer a toy-town Ruritanian talking shop at Stormont, forever depending on handouts from Britain; exactly the original fever dream of the irrelevant UUP, now displaced by the bewildered, disoriented DUP.

Tomorrow you may see Naomi Long decapitate the DUP thanks to tactical voting by Sinn Féin and SDLP voters but what you also see across the north is 80% of voters supporting candidates from two ethno-national communities.