Belfast Exposed photography gallery on Donegall Street hosted “Why Is Identity So Difficult?”, a public lecture and discussion delivered by Professor Dominic Bryan of Queen’s University Belfast. The event was organised by the Office of Identity and Cultural Expression (OICE) and formed part of the gallery’s BIEN programme, which accompanies three concurrent exhibitions exploring identity in its many dimensions: work on the Irish language tradition; the material decay of Ulster Scots buildings; and the story of the travelling community, refugees, asylum seekers, and new arrivals.

In her introduction, Katy Radford (Director, OICE) set the tone, framing the discussion as “a provocation for you and us to all think about identity and creative expression”.

The social construction of identity

Professor Bryan opened by emphasising that identity is neither natural nor fixed. “Identity is socially constructed,” he said. “It does not come naturally, changes constantly, and is deeply intertwined with politics.” Our sense of self, he argued, is shaped primarily by the social groups we belong to — or are placed in by others.

That last point is crucial to understanding ethnic and national identity. Identity can be ascribed as well as chosen: “Racism comes out of exactly that — people might not want to be discriminated against, but they’re discriminated against because other groups perceive them in a particular way.” Once a social category acquires a shared consciousness and sense of solidarity, it becomes a social group capable of political action. Politicians know this well, and are adept at “dialling up” national identity for emotional purposes — exploiting the deep-seated feelings that ethnic belonging generates.

Nations as modern inventions

The lecture’s most provocative argument was that the ethnic bonds underpinning national identity are, to a significant degree, fabricated. “Nations are modern inventions,” Bryan said flatly. In the medieval period, most people identified with family and a feudal lord, not an imagined national community. It was industrialisation, empire, and the printing press that created the conditions for ethnic nationalism to take hold — producing shared maps, shared histories, and shared myths of common descent.

Drawing on A. D. Smith’s work, Bryan outlined the characteristics that bind ethnic groups into nations: a collective name, a myth of shared blood, a common history, and a sense of solidarity around a particular territory. Yet he was equally quick to show how manufactured these markers can be. Scottish clan tartans were largely the invention of an English cloth merchant around 1800. The corned beef and cabbage meal claimed as an Irish St Patrick’s Day tradition originated not in Ireland but among Irish immigrants in New York and Chicago. The Guinness pouring ritual, now freighted with ethnic meaning, dates only from the early 1970s; the “authentic” Irish pub aesthetic was a commercial design rolled out globally by Diageo from 1991. “The Irish government has never objected to its almost monopoly position,” Bryan noted, “because it’s good for the Irish nation — it’s soft power.” The ethnic feels ancient; the reality is often recent and invented.

Civic nationalism vs ethnic nationalism

Towards the end of his lecture, Bryan turned to the tension he considers central to contemporary politics: the conflict between civic nationalism — grounded in rights and responsibilities — and ethnic nationalism, grounded in blood, myth, and emotional solidarity. His preference was clear, if resigned. “I would love to come up with a way of running this world that doesn’t involve nationalism and where people’s humanity is seen for what it is,” he said. “But civic nationalism is harder to convince people of — it’s less emotional.” Politicians, he argued, tend to reach for ethnic nationalism because “it tells great stories of who we are.” He cited Gordon Brown’s promotion of the Union Jack as a symbol of Britishness as one example of this tendency.

“I lean towards, ‘We’ve just got to find a way of making the civic work,’” Bryan concluded, “not because I love it, but because I think it’s a better way to treat human beings than the ethnic nationalism that we have shifted to in the world in recent years.”

Questions and discussion

The lecture was followed by a lively question-and-answer session.

One audience member, reflecting on Northern Ireland as a post-conflict society more than 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, asked whether there was growing awareness among the population that they share more identity-forming narratives than their political structures suggest.

Bryan acknowledged the tension. “I wrote an article recently called ‘Northern Ireland: more shared and more divided’”, he said, “and I suppose I’m answering your question by saying,  ‘I’m not sure.’” He identified two competing pressures: the continued political institutionalisation of national differences on one hand, and the growing diversity of the population on the other. International companies, he observed, “just want the people to do the job”, while popular culture increasingly crosses traditional community boundaries. “The diversity stuff is basically winning out,” he ventured, “and peace is pretty well embedded in this society now.” He added that any future united Ireland would require the Irish government to reckon seriously with diversity — “to represent Irishness in a more diverse way as well.”

Another raised the question of accents — noting the incongruity he had felt hearing a Good Friday Agreement negotiator speak about Irish identity in a London accent. Bryan seized on the point. “Accents are very understudied,” he said. “Cities are places of migration — this city doesn’t exist without migration.”

The discussion then moved to Canada as a case study in nationalism and diversity. An audience member noted the emergence of “Québécois” as a distinct identity after the 1970s, separate from a broader Canadian one. Bryan agreed that Canada offered instructive lessons. “The Canadian way of dealing with that conundrum,” he said, “is to say, ‘Look, we want you to stay a part of this state, and to do so we’re probably going to exaggerate the importance of French — we’re going to make you all sort of learn it.’” He saw this as a necessary cost: “That’s what you need sometimes — to embrace that diversity, to over-recognise those diverse groups to make them feel part of your country.”

Returning to the question of civic versus ethnic nationalism, Bryan was pressed on whether the two could be meaningfully distinguished, given that politicians exploit emotional cords in either case. Bryan was candid. “Both civic and ethnic elements exist in nearly all nations,” he conceded, but maintained that the direction of travel matters. “I think that diversity stuff is basically winning out,” he repeated. “We live in a different world than 1969 [the onset of the Troubles] — it’s not circular — and I’m hopeful that that diverse model of a place wins out.”

The event closed with warm applause, and audience members were invited to view the three exhibitions on show at Belfast Exposed.

This article is cross-published at Mr Ulster.