Irish nationalism and the natural insular landscape of Ireland before partition: Insularity versus the wishes of the inhabitants

Abstract

The place of natural landscapes in nationalist discourses has remained greatly under-researched. For John Agnew the political geographer, this is explained by the fact that the cases of France and mostly England were used as universal and paradigmatic models, which resulted in simplistic accounts of the role of landscapes in the formation of other national identities (Agnew, 2002). Agnew himself, and a few others like Lowenthal (Lowenthal, 1979), Zimmer (Zimmer, 1998) or Kaufmann (Kaufmann, 1998; Kaufmann and Zimmer, 1998) have called for greater scientific effort in order to better theorize and contextualize the role and value of natural landscapes in shaping national identities: The role of landscape in national identity should be related to the specifics of national-state formation than presumed to be invariant across all cases. In other words, the politics of landscape in particular cases is what should concern us, not identifying and celebrating landscape elements that presumably represent the natural flowering of a particular national identity. (Agnew, 2011, p. 37).