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In the 1970s, the political conflicts in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East were often grouped together as among the world's most intractable. They exhibited profound racial and ethnic animosities, reinforced by linguistic, cultural, economic, and religious differences, and solidified by decades of more-or-less violent confrontation. They were often held out as paradigms of “divided” societies, and there seemed little chance of a transition to peaceful, let alone fully democratic, arrangements in any of them. Whether one focused on the players contending for power, the histories of the conflicts, or the capacities of outsiders to influence events, the prospects for negotiated settlements seemed dim. The conflicts have diverged remarkably in subsequent decades. South Africa, often depicted in the grim 1970s as the most intractable of intractables, moved through a comparatively peaceful four-year transition to majority rule in a unitary state. Democratic elections in 1994, 1999, and 2004 put the African National Congress (ANC) securely in power without civil war, economic collapse, or catastrophic white exodus. To be sure, the continuing economic and social challenges are enormous, with a third of the population unemployed and one in nine infected with HIV, but by most measures South Africa has weathered the transition well. Democracy may not yet be entrenched in South African politics, but it seems at least to have a fighting chance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its heroic phase, the city was a site of pluralism, an example of the uses of diversity. It was in such a period that Dr Johnson could observe that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. The celebration of urbanity was not confined to cities – even the greatest of all Lake Poets could join in: Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! Wordsworth (1807) here explicitly says that no valley, rock or hill can bring out natural beauty as well as does Westminster Bridge. The city still in sleep becomes an illustration of that romantic definition of poetry which sees it as might half-slumbering on its own right arm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Virtues are individual; vices are national.’ That witty Enlightenment formulation gained added authority through the twentieth century, as nationalists of one kind or another wrought havoc. By the 1980s the very notion of international solidarity had changed its meaning, having ceased to denote the pooling of national resources and become instead an alternative to nationalism, an international style. All talk was of ‘world novels’ and ‘world music’ in a global economy. Yet by 1998 cricket fans celebrated a famous victory in the test series with South Africa by waving English flags rather than Union Jacks. The Cross of St George flies ever higher on these occasions, while cultural nationalism enjoys a new vogue even among exponents of left–liberal Critical Theory. John Rutherford's Forever England concludes with a lament that ‘England’ remains as yet undefined. Only rare contemporary thinkers such as Tom Nairn have registered the fact that, far from being only a backward-looking philosophy, nationalism might also be the sign and shape of the future. The collapse of communism in 1989 simply speeded up a process which had marked a growth from about fifty recognised nation–states in 1945 to something more like two hundred as the century ends. Critical Theory is now becoming open to the suggestion that many ‘international’ arrangements from Great Britain through the European Union to the Organisation of African States may be little more than mechanisms for reinforcing the hegemony of one strong power at the expense of all others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1991: WHO FEARS TO SPEAK OF EASTER WEEK? On Easter Sunday 1991, the leaders of the Irish Republic gathered at the General Post Office in Dublin to remember the event that led to their state's foundation. The ceremony was spare. Five surviving veterans of the Rising attended (a sixth stayed away as a protest at what he saw as the current politicians' betrayal of the ideals of 1916). A revelation in the Irish Press during the previous week that no special travel arrangements had been made for the veterans, some of whom were infirm, had the desired effect. The former rebels were given seats near to state dignitaries. Later, the Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey, was featured in an interview on the six o'clock news. The reporter did not ask whether such a brief, sheepish ceremony was an appropriate way to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary, or whether it might be contrasted unfavourably with 4 July celebrations in the United States or Bastille Day in France. What transpired was far more interesting than that: the leader of a sovereign state was asked why he was holding a ceremony at all. If privately he considered the question insulting or stupid, he concealed his feelings with great skill and gave a civil answer. The reporter suggested that IRA terrorists might derive comfort and succour from the festivities. Mr Haughey quietly denied this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To write – as to read – is to enter a sort of exile from the world around us. But to go into exile from the world around us may well be a signal to write. Although Ireland has produced many authors, it has on its own land-mass sustained less writing than one might be led to believe. Even a great national poet like Yeats managed to spend more of his life outside the country than in: and the list of artists-in-exile stretches from Congreve to Edna O'Brien. Nor was exile solely a condition of those who wrote in English. Much of the literature produced in Irish during the ‘revival’ in the early decades of the seventeenth century was composed and published in the cities of continental Europe. It is almost as if Irish writers found that they had to go out into the world in order to discover who exactly they were. The problem faced by many was the discovery that an ‘image’ had preceded them to their first overseas encounter. There may be no essence of Irishness, any more than there is of Jewishness, but both peoples have had a common experience – that of being defined, derided and decided by others. If you want to know what an Irishman is, ask an Englishman, for the very notion of a unitary national identity, like that of a united Ireland as an administrative entity, is an English invention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]