Hailing from East Belfast, Jack Foster (1944-) spent the bulk of his professional life as a British and Irish literature professor at British Columbia. Nowadays, he holds the position of honorary research professor at Queen’s University Belfast and resides in the Ards peninsula, while undertaking Titanic-related research.
Foster’s essay collection, intriguingly named which will be clarified later, conglomerates works that were published from 2017 to 2023 in a variety of platforms, counting among them both Irish and Northern Irish newspapers. Although it features a limited amount of footnoted updates, the essays are mainly untouched and unadjusted.
Foster justifies any reiteration present in his works as a necessary response to not only the repetitive demands of Irish nationalism but also the drive to diversify and promote a Northern Ireland that exists outside of the UK.
Foster’s writing is clear and not mired in the pompous obscurity that has tarnished Anglophone literary criticism for years. This allows his readers to discern both his strengths and weakness, even when his humour leans towards the grumpy side. Two of his essays, “Pretendians”, a scathing expose on North Americans who falsify indigenous or black heritage, and “An Angry Wind”, a critical yet somewhat cynical analysis of Maud Gonne, prove this.
When Foster became a Canadian citizen, he was told by the judging panel not to abandon his cultural roots. If he took this advice as a Northern Irishman to be misguided, the judge needn’t have been concerned – Foster’s cultural background remains embraced.
Foster expressed his fondness for Dublin over Belfast on a social level, and he identifies as British and Irish in an equal and inseparable sense, a dual identity shared with 0.61 per cent of respondents in the 2021 Northern Ireland census.
However, Foster admits that his support for Brexit led to a loss of some friendships in the capital of Ireland.
Professor Foster should be aware that the term ‘Brexit’ did not feature on the voting slip. This is because the correct legal term is not Britain, but rather the UK, and Britain doesn’t include Northern Ireland. Many British citizens reside in Northern Ireland – a region formed originally to fulfil their needs.
Professor Foster chose ‘leave’, responding to the question, ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union, or leave the European Union?’ Nonetheless, the repercussions of Brexit, charted by Foster, have transpired. Foster isn’t pleased with the outcomes, refusing to fully blame himself and others who voted ‘leave’ for the unfortunate results of their ill-conceived recklessness.
Through definitive majority verdicts in Westminster which supported two agreements, the full withdrawal of Great Britain from the EU’s institutions has come to pass, including the European Single Market and the Customs Union. But, Northern Ireland, despite distancing from the EU’s political institutions due to the well-known protocol, is still part of the single market for goods and agriculture, and the British government administers European customs regulations at ports and airports within Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not one part of this agreement or punctuation has been altered by the Windsor Framework or Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s policy document titled, ‘Securing the Union’.
Professor Foster, Jim Allister, and I all concur on these recent observations. The BBC labels these as ‘post-Brexit trading arrangements’ to encapsulate the protocol, but it spans more than just commerce. It ensures that the rights set out in the Good Friday Agreement, those found in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, remain intact, thereby cementing international protection of the Good Friday Agreement.
Foster alerts us of any antagonism present in his set due to a rise in Irish nationalism, exclusive to the post-Brexit era, sweeping across broad stretches of Irish society, a group that includes the so-called moderate nationalist political parties, which disconcerts unionists with its demand for a border poll and predictions of unification.
The claims put forward by Leo Varadkar, an alleged offender, an Irish literature scholar, and myself, despite my “evaluation” coming from a favourably cited critique, rather than a true comprehension of my work, will undoubtedly prompt suspicions of ‘whataboutism’ in most readers. It might be asked whether British, and particularly English, nationalism did not experience a rise prior and subsequent to the 2016 vote. Isn’t it also right that Foster should concede his involvement in this trend?
Foster’s peculiar interpretation of Brexit was witnessing an aspiration for space and revitalisation. He even found it plausible, in line with Ray Bassett, former Irish ambassador to Canada, that the “economic reasoning of Brexit” could potentially result in Ireland jointly leaving the EU. This would entail a self-destructive agreement with the looming, lofty nation overhead.
Foster justifies his inadequate fact-checking for his decision arguing that casting a Remain vote meant sentencing the UK to the control of a colossal institution. He also broaches the topic of an Orwellian vast “Big Brother-like mega-institution” elsewhere. (My accentuations).
The European Commission employs roughly 32,000 full-time staff, contract employees included, a figure not significantly higher than the workforce of the city of Philadelphia. The European Central Bank has an additional 5,000 workers, but the UK had a euro exemption.
Foster casually discusses the “4,000 pages (or maybe more?)” of EU rules, though the reality is a significantly higher number.
The “acquis communautaire” consists of 35 sections which, dependent on the nation’s language, and pertinent page organisation procedures, can range between 80,000 and 170,000 pages of text. The UK has had to retain or modify, instead of discarding, much of this established EU law in an attempt to control economic damage; and such a degree of regulation is obligatory for any current economy.
Such an oversight of the facts is inexcusable for an academic.
Despite this, Foster does manage to land a few successful critiques in his review of Fintan O’Toole’s entertaining tirade, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018).
Foster asserts that “Psychology, rather than political science, is the ethos that drives ‘Heroic Failure’,” a contention that rings true. However, despite embodying England as a tormented patient enduring perceived tyranny, O’Toole’s Heroic Failure may best be interpreted as Swiftian satire rather than an ardent Freudian analysis of nations. Foster correctly criticises O’Toole’s excessive emphasis on colonial nostalgia as the predominant reason for Brexit, while accepting its role in the broader narrative.
Yet, Foster’s own lack of objectivity is obvious. Pondering comparisons with France and Germany, he queries rhetorically, “Does Britain’s Parliament include far-right parties?” The intended response is negative, but this overlooks the Democratic Unionist Party which was supporting the Tories at the time of O’Toole’s writing and similarly sidelines O’Toole’s discussions on the “European Research Group”.
The book’s title is a wry comeback to “England out of Ireland”, a placard from the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York in 2019, which, according to Foster, involved Mary Lou McDonald. The longest essay in the book carries the same title, and mostly offers a precise compilation of personal accounts of highly accomplished Irish emigrants, primarily from southern Ireland, to Great Britain. This is peppered with dry references to those recently dubbed as Niple (New Irish Person Living in England).
What’s the aim? Initially, it appears to propose that “Britain is an extension of Ireland, even a colony of the Irish mind,” so to speak. This argument is not entirely convincing, even as an analogy. While a large Algerian immigrant population exists in France, it does not imply that France is an extension of Algerian consciousness, contrary to the beliefs of some supporters of Madame Le Pen.
An essential distinction remains overlooked; it pertains to the fundamental difference, understandably clear to a Canadian professor, between voluntary migrants who are accepted, assimilated, and integrated, and settler colonists who displace indigenous communities, often leading to violent actions including land seizure, forced cultural shifts and segregation.
The second argument posited, stating that it would be beneficial for Ireland and its people to acknowledge and embrace Britain’s Irishness and Ireland’s Britishness, is the more persuasive one. It is not necessary to indulge in Foster’s fantasised concept of an “archipelagic” reunification of Ireland and Great Britain for this recognition and acceptance to occur. In fact, it would be simpler to achieve this if the UK re-joined the EU.
There’s also a debate around whether the most ambitious Irish individuals see London as their preferred city, regardless of their field, be it construction, academia, art, banking, technology or even politics. Without concrete survey results, I’d conjecture that those with lofty ambitions might instead have idealised cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Washington as places where they’d ideally want their talent to be acknowledged, even if temporarily.
Foster’s vehement antagonism towards Sinn Féin and those advocating for peaceful, democratic, and constitutional unification lacks subtlety and understanding regarding historical conflict sources and existing challenges. His strong sentiment causes him to dismiss the Shared Island Initiative with almost as much vehement as he rejects the IRA’s militaristic tactics. It’s surprising to see he perceives Fianna Fáil Tánaiste Micheál Martin as a potentially crafty threat to unionists.
Contrary to Jack Foster’s assertions, the Good Friday Agreement’s spirit and letter don’t require nationalists to abandon their pursuit for a unified Ireland. Nor does it oblige unionists to stop championing for a union with Great Britain. The agreement calls for respect for all — nationalists, unionists, British, and Irish.
It advocates powersharing within the North and strong North-South and East-West collaboration if Northern Ireland continues as part of the union. It also affords Several potential frameworks for a unified Ireland in the future. Every possible model should ideally contemplate an Ireland where Jack Foster, as a British citizen and an individual identifying as both British and Irish, could be comfortable, if not entirely satisfied.
Brendan O’Leary, the Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and winner of the 2023 Brian Farrell Prize for his most recent book, Making Sense of a United Ireland, is the author.
For those open to further reading, consider Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights by Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 1995).
In his scholarly work, Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka identifies a difference between national minorities residing on their ancestral lands within multinational states and ethnic groups, mostly comprised of voluntary immigrants, living in multiethnic states. Kymlicka contends that while both have a right to cultural representation, national minorities warrant more robust protections.
Highlighted works include the influential collection by Dutch and American political scientist Arend Lijphart, titled “Thinking About Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice”, published by Routledge in 2008. The book presents compelling insights on topics like consociation, federation, coalition governments, election systems, and majority rule limitations.
Also recommended is Luuk van Middelaar’s “The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union”, from Yale University Press, 2013. In this compelling reading, van Middelaar employs theories from Machiavelli among others to make clear the emergence of the European Union. The Dutch author’s narrative successfully combats the notion that writing on the European Union must be tedious. It is advised to read this book before delving into its subsequent publications: the 2019 ‘Alarums & Excursions’ and 2021’s ‘Pandemonium’.