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Verso Books
Reclaiming Reunification: Radical Visions of a United Ireland
Reclaiming Reunification: Radical Visions of a United Ireland
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What kind of state would a united Ireland be? A socialist answer to the reunification debate.
Reclaiming Reunification offers a major socialist intervention in the growing debate on Irish unity. The decisive question is no longer whether reunification will happen, but what kind of state will emerge when it does. Colin Gannon argues for a mass democratic politics and radical all-Ireland political consciousness to avoid a technocratic transition and wrest control of the debate from constitutional nationalists, establishment parties and unelected bureaucrats who would prefer to see a reunification from above.
The dominant vision on offer is bleakly familiar: a united Ireland as an expanded tax haven, a merger of two capitalist statelets that leaves inequality and the legacies of partition largely intact. Reclaiming Reunification is a provocation against that future. Clearly argued, it examines the history of constitutional nationalism since partition to confront the strategic dilemmas facing the Irish left today. Can it build and mobilise support for its own radical vision of unity, or must it seek merely to pull Sinn Féin leftwards? How should it engage the Unionist community in the North? And could a genuinely radical 32-county republic ever emerge in Britain’s backyard?
Ireland is at a crossroads. This book is a call to seize a once-in-a-century opportunity to reshape reunification from below and build a new republic that works for everyone, not just foreign investors, domestic capitalists and landlords. Outside Ireland, it will intrigue readers across the British and North American left and the Irish diaspora.
Reclaiming Reunification offers a major socialist intervention in the growing debate on Irish unity. The decisive question is no longer whether reunification will happen, but what kind of state will emerge when it does. Colin Gannon argues for a mass democratic politics and radical all-Ireland political consciousness to avoid a technocratic transition and wrest control of the debate from constitutional nationalists, establishment parties and unelected bureaucrats who would prefer to see a reunification from above.
The dominant vision on offer is bleakly familiar: a united Ireland as an expanded tax haven, a merger of two capitalist statelets that leaves inequality and the legacies of partition largely intact. Reclaiming Reunification is a provocation against that future. Clearly argued, it examines the history of constitutional nationalism since partition to confront the strategic dilemmas facing the Irish left today. Can it build and mobilise support for its own radical vision of unity, or must it seek merely to pull Sinn Féin leftwards? How should it engage the Unionist community in the North? And could a genuinely radical 32-county republic ever emerge in Britain’s backyard?
Ireland is at a crossroads. This book is a call to seize a once-in-a-century opportunity to reshape reunification from below and build a new republic that works for everyone, not just foreign investors, domestic capitalists and landlords. Outside Ireland, it will intrigue readers across the British and North American left and the Irish diaspora.
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