Graham Wheeler has written an ambitious history of the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party, from its origins as an anti–Home Rule movement, to the Stormont parliament's party of government, to the leading voice of unionism in Northern Ireland under direct rule. He stresses consistent issues throughout the party's history, such as its inability to move beyond its original program of opposition to Irish unity and its futile quest for a permanent settlement of Northern Ireland's status. He also evaluates the importance of the set-aside of seats on the Council for the Orange Order as a key to the perpetuation of ethnic politics in Northern Ireland: “By placing [the Orange Order] so prominently within the engine room of Unionism … they were signalling their willingness formally to embrace religious sectarianism and the militant ethnic politics which accompanied it” (23).
The Unionist Party faced the standard nationalist movement's problem of portraying a unified public image while handling numerous internal factions. Given the nature of Home Rule opposition and the continued alienation of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, the Unionist Party could never escape this dilemma and evolve into a conventional parliamentary party. According to Walker, Unionist leaders missed several chances to modernize the party's structure and therefore remained at the mercy of the Ulster Unionist Council, an arrangement that virtually paralyzed David Trimble's leadership following the Belfast Agreement.
The best interpretations in the book involve Walker's discussion of the complex question of Ulster Unionist identity. Walker believes that Ulster identity is ambiguous and multidimensional both by chance and by design. He argues that by the late nineteenth century Ulster Protestants, while still committed citizens of the United Kingdom, already saw themselves as a “frontier people” in Ireland in the Ulster Scots pioneering tradition (1). He also notes that religious sectarianism permeated Ulster's earlier history and that the Orange Order “had posed as an ethno-cultural movement” in Ulster for decades before the rise of home rule opposition (2).
Walker avoids the common intellectual trap of searching for a single interpretation to explain Ulster Unionist attitudes. He observes that by the early twentieth century Unionists in Ulster “came to feel that their protestations of loyalty to the Union, as Irishmen, were not enough in the political battle against Irish Nationalism. To the civic strain of argument against any change to their British citizenship was added the decidedly ethnic one of an Ulster Protestant distinctiveness with its own right of self-determination” (7). He argues that Ulster Unionists during this time constructed their own nationalism “as a cultural project to serve political ends” (6), but rejected the term “nationalist” to distinguish themselves from their political opponents.
Walker does acknowledge the dangerous stagnation of Northern Ireland policy in mid-century and the deplorable discrimination against the province's Catholic minority, but also notes that all Unionist prime ministers felt a need to maintain party unity in facing the twin electoral challenges of Independent Unionists and the Northern Ireland Labour Party. He notes that Unionism's strength lay in its ability to incorporate Ulster Protestant workers into the movement through the 1920s and that the gradual loss of this worker support culminated in the complete rupture of Official Unionism in the 1960s.
He attributes the consistent failure of Unionist leaders to institute progressive reforms to the hostility of Unionist constituencies where a visceral ethnic hostility to Catholics intimidated the leadership's more civic-oriented Unionism. Surprisingly Walker does not comment on the utter failure of civic unionism in the Irish partition settlement of 1921. This explains why no British government has seriously considered the integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom and why reform efforts such as the Sunningdale and Belfast Agreements have chosen to formalize Protestant and Catholic ethnic blocs rather than promote a nonsectarian arrangement.
While Walker sympathizes with the Catholic minority he shows no sympathy for Irish nationalism. He argues that Northern Ireland's Catholic politicians continuously retreated to the “time-worn” politics of antipartition and the view of themselves as “second-class citizens” in Northern Ireland (192). This undercut efforts to create a secular civic unionism combining Protestants and Catholics and therefore reinforced official Unionism's ethnic identity and pursuit of ethnic supremacy, which Walker unconvincingly describes as simply a form of defensiveness in the face of the nationalist threat to the state's existence.
Though Walker himself shows a preference for civic unionism he notes that the Ulster Unionist Party rarely abandoned the precarious balancing act between it and ethnic Protestant identity. On the two occasions when the Ulster Unionist Party made civic identity the centerpiece of its program—in the 1970 by-elections and in the post-1998 period—it decisively lost to the narrow ethnic politics of Ian Paisley. In light of this seemingly essential ethnic component in Ulster Unionism, a necessity that Walker describes but does not acknowledge, the decisive victories of Paisley's party over David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party since 2003 should not surprise any reader of Walker's book.
Walker also examines Ulster Unionism within the context of varieties of Britishness. Walker shows how the peculiarity of Northern Ireland's political situation created both the perception and the reality of distance from Britain and how British governments’ lack of sympathy toward Stormont policies led to a reinforcement of an exceptional Ulster perception of itself. Walker however notes that recent moves toward federalism within the United Kingdom have marked the “end of freakish exceptionalism” for Northern Ireland (257) and have given the province greater legitimacy, highlighting it as just one example of the variations inherent in British identity.
Walker's research is based on a wide variety of primary sources and includes brief biographies of leading Unionist politicians at the end of the book. This thought-provoking book should appeal to students of Northern Irish and British history as well as those studying the history of European nationalism and federal political systems.
