White (inter)nationalism, Europe and the ‘distribution of the sensible’

Abstract

This intervention approaches the Southport tragedy from the perspective of a protest in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the wake of the killings. Like many major towns and cities across the UK, Belfast witnessed anti-immigrant demonstrations and violence, alongside counterdemonstrations in the aftermath of the events in Southport. However, what made the Belfast protest distinctive was the international element, drawing a small group of far-right nationalists from Dublin to march alongside pro-British nationalists in Belfast. Given the deep historical divisions between these strains of nationalism on the island, which were hitherto seen as diametrically opposed, this invites deeper consideration of the meaning and potential of such a nascent alliance. The robust political response from Dublin revealed that the Belfast protest clearly posed a direct threat to the nationalist vision of the Irish state, but also underscored how compromised that vision is by a blindness to the fuller implications of empire and a reliance on Europeanised notions of ‘cosmopolitanism’. This paper deploys Rancière's concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ to deconstruct the state's response to this ideological threat.