Nationalist myths : revisiting Heslinga's "The Irish border as a cultural divide"

This paper offers a critique of MV Heslinga’s argument that the geographical structure of these islands has for millennia served to funnel interchange in an east-west direction, resulting in a deeply embedded cultural cleavage between the northern and southern regions of both Ireland and Great Britain. This form of geographical determinism lends itself to contemporary British/Ulster nationalism’s case for the naturalness of partition. In this way, it mirrors the geographical determinism of Irish nationalism. Both deploy geography in the service of political projects that are fundamentally grounded in recent political events the outcome of which was neither predictable nor inevitable.