Brendan O’Leary gets to grips with John Wilson Foster’s collection of essays
New York, June 17th, 1981: A protest against Britain's continued presence in Northern Ireland, with demonstrators waving the American flag and Tricolour. Photograph: Jefferson Siebert/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesJack Foster hails from east Belfast, spent most of his career as a professor of British and Irish literature at British Columbia, and is now an honorary research professor at Queen’s University Belfast. He lives in the Ards peninsula and is also a Titanicologist.
Anne Applebaum: ‘Trump is a transactional person whose interest is in himself... It’s why he is more dangerous’When Foster became a Canadian, the citizenship judge told him and his cohort that they were not to leave their previous cultures behind. Being from Northern Ireland, Foster deemed that foolish counsel, but the judge need not have worried: Jack did not, and has not, left his culture behind.
Foster warns us that any hostility in his collection is owed “to the post-Brexit surge of exclusive Irish nationalism across swathes of Irish society, including the so-called moderate nationalist political parties, and which harries unionists with its clamour for a border poll and predictions of unification”.
There are 35 chapters in the “acquis communautaire”, which, depending on the language of the member state, and the relevant pagination protocols, may vary from anywhere between 80,000 to 170,000 pages of text. The UK has had to keep or amend — rather than delete — much of this settled EU law to staunch the bleeding of its economy; and any modern economy requires at least this level of regulation.“Psychology,” Foster writes, “not political science, is the ‘discipline’ which drives Heroic Failure.
There is an overlooked difference here, which should register with a Canadian professor, between those who arrive in a place through voluntary migration, and are accepted, and eventually integrated and assimilated, and settler colonists who displace natives — sometimes killing or expelling them, taking their lands, segregating them and forcefully changing their culture.
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