Ethnonationalism is, in essence, the idea that nationality is inherently linked to the race and the DNA of the individual who claims it. The clue is in the name: that a country like Ireland exists for the primary benefit of people who are ethnically Irish.
Looking at this proposition superficially and at first glance, it makes some sense, and may even seem attractive. For the most part, modern nation states evolved around ethnic identity and most people would intuitively agree that Germany is the modern homeland of the Germanic people who have occupied that region since before the time of the Roman Empire, or that Greece is the home of the Greek people who were the first to develop democratic government.
Most Irish people would agree, I think, with the basic proposition that Ireland is the ancestral homeland of the celtic people who have lived here, without interruption since before the time of the Romans.
Yet most of us might also agree that there are many people whose ancestors are much more recent additions to the island who are, nevertheless, Irish. My wife, for example, has a surname of Flemish origin; my colleagues Fatima Gunning and Jason Osborne bear surnames of Anglo-Norman extraction; there are many people in Waterford descended from French Huguenots who arrived as refugees in the 1600’s; our national parliament building is named for the Fitzgerald family, Dukes of Leinster under the British Crown, many of whose descendants and distant cousins retain the name today and consider themselves 100% Irish. Many more of us than know it likely contain norse blood deposited, often without the consent of the recipients, by viking raiders in the 9th and 10th centuries.
From an intellectual perspective, this is where modern ethnonationalism falls flat on its face. If Irishness is in fact tied to racial and ethnic heritage, then the descendants of Huguenot refugees in Waterford have no more claim to Irishness than somebody who arrived into Dublin airport yesterday claiming asylum. Almost everybody accepts the notion that while it is not always successful, nations can assimilate and have assimilated divergent ethnic and cultural groups over time without any real threat to national, ethnic, or cultural identity. Indeed, many national identities and cultures are themselves much newer than others precisely because of such assimilation: Englishness is essentially the result of the blending of Anglo Saxon and Norman cultures and languages just under a thousand years ago. The Hungarians might be descended from Magyar tribal warriors who arrived in Europe from the Eastern Steppes at roughly the same time, but there are many patriotic Hungarians of Germanic descent because of centuries of Hapsburg rule.
This weekend, ethnonationalists in Ireland took to social media in their tens of dozens with all the ferocity they could muster, in order to take grave exception to the idea that a successful Irish athlete, Rhasidat Adeleke, can be truly Irish. Their arguments are not hard to summarise:
Ms. Adeleke, they say, is not of Irish ancestry. Her parents are Nigerian. She was born here, but she lacks, according to this worldview, a necessary family history of Irishness. Depending on the particular activist, you may or may not also hear an argument that Ms. Adeleke is not racially Irish, or to be blunt, that she does not “look” Irish. By definition, according to the ethnonationalist, she cannot be considered as Irish – if she can be considered Irish at all – as her fellow athlete Ciara Magean, who was born to Northern Irish parents in the staunchly catholic and nationalist town of Portaferry.
And… that’s it. That Ms. Adeleke was born in Tallaght is irrelevant, to this line of thinking. The fact that she speaks like every other child born and raised in Tallaght is irrelevant. The fact that she received the same Irish education, steeped in Irish culture and thought, is irrelevant. The fact that she clearly feels pride in her flag – the tricolour – is irrelevant. She’s not one of us because her grandparents were not one of us, and because it might be conceivable that in addition to her Irishness, she also feels an affinity for her parents’ Nigerian heritage.
This logic, of course, makes Declan Rice – the next captain of the English national football team – more Irish than a proud Irish sportswoman. It makes Joe Biden more Irish than the last person to hold the office of Taoiseach. It likely makes the Duke of Wellington more Irish than Eamon DeValera. It also, perhaps amusingly, makes recently deceased IRA volunteer Rose Dugdale more English than Charles III, whose father was Danish or Greek, depending on your priors. If you examine ideas of Irishness or nationality more broadly through a purely ethnic lense, you will as a matter of certainty arrive at functionally insane outcomes.
Which is why the majority of people do not, and never will, embrace a purely ethno-nationalistic view of either the world, or of Irishness.
It is true of course that most of us accept that there is an ethnic component to Irishness – that being of Irish descent matters. It is why we feel pride in the achievements of the diaspora, and why US Presidents who claim kinship receive heroes welcomes on their homecomings. It is why it hurt so much to so many Irish soccer fans when the aforementioned Mr. Declan Rice realised that his loyalty to the land of his birth and citizenship – England – outweighed his loyalty to the land of his family’s ancestry.
Yet it is also true that the vast majority of the public embraces a broader view, which is why Bundee Aki is an Irish rugby legend who will pay for very few pints in this country for the remainder of his life, despite being a New Zealand-born person of Samoan descent.
The majority of Irish people are inherently fair-minded and, perhaps more to the point, ambitious for the country. They not only accept that Irish people can be made as well as born – they actively desire that to be the case. When they look at Rhasidat Adeleke, they see somebody who has repaid the opportunities this country gave to her, and take pride in her accomplishments because they are Irish accomplishments.
This is why ethnonationalism is a political dead end as well as an intellectual dead end. Nobody likes, or will ever like, the sad case in the corner attacking success. Ethnonationalism is an assault on fairness as well as logic: The idea that some layabout is “more Irish” than a successful athlete despite having contributed nothing to the nation, while the athlete he decries has contributed sporting success, strikes most people as a nonsense. A nonsense that’s the preserve of the entitled layabout, at that.
You don’t need to be a political genius to work out that “Rhasidat Adeleke isn’t Irish” is not exactly a political slogan likely to attract the masses. In the great preponderance of cases, the best one might hope for from the voter is “she might not be, but she’s of more use to us than you”.