Writing The Discovery of India in 1946, one of the founding texts of modern Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru asked the deceptively simple question: "Who is an Indian?" Nehru's argument was for a layered, complex, historically nuanced definition, consciously forward-looking rather than taking refuge in an idea of past purity.
National cultures, he wrote, were not self-enclosed wholes, but systems of interconnected differences. The questions Nehru posed (from prison, as it happened) half a century ago have stayed like other elements in Indian history, intensely relevant to Ireland. And on Friday, modern Ireland chose a flexible, outward-looking and pluralist answer to the question of defining an Irish person.
Up to the moment the polls opened, unionist scepticism attracted more attention than nationalist affirmation; and from Friday night, most attention has - rightly - been paid to the cliff-hanging edge of the unionist majority in favour of the Easter Agreement proposals. But what is equally striking is the marginalisation of the Republican hardliners in Northern Ireland: instead there is a massive nationalist agreement to proposals which are lightyears away from the traditional Republican desideratum (and by that token, light years nearer the world as it actually is). And, above all, it is worth considering the overwhelming endorsement of the agreement proposals as put to the Republic's electorate, because they reflect the most significant statement of popular opinion since 1921 on the basic question of Irish political identity.
Not before time. Reading Peter Hart's riveting new book on violence and community in Co Cork from 1916 to 1923, The IRA and its Enemies, it is striking how often one particular phrase jumps out from the record of altercations between freedom-fighters, ex-comrades, policemen, politicians, or newly-estranged neighbours during that troubled time: "I am as good an Irishman as you."
The problem of defining a "good" Irishman or Irishwoman has been with us since time immemorial. Rather like Isaiah Berlin's historic distinction between "the freedom from doing things" and "the freedom to do things", the question of Irish identity has been susceptible of two methods of definition - one positive and one negative. Into the negative definition, questions of race, religion and political faith immediately obtruded. If you were neither Catholic, "Gaelic" nor "green", you were not "Irish": an inheritance from the efforts of Irish-Irelander polemicists like D.P. Moran a hundred years ago to sanitise the definition of Irishness into a simple congruence rather than a graded spectrum. History, and not only Irish history, shows all the time what disasters occur when the borders of states, nations and geography are drawn to fit some preconceived theory; even several Sinn Feiners during the revolutionary period were aware that to impose their definition of Irishness on Ulster Unionists raised large and tricky questions. "Should we require from them," asked one such sceptic, "what we refuse to give to England?"
Nonetheless, the idea persisted that a "negative" definition of Irishness was somehow compatible with claiming a million people who conspicuously did not fit it. The way round the conundrum was - as W.B. Yeats, Hubert Butler, Sean O Faolain and some others saw early on - to adopt a positive rather than negative definition of Irishness, which accepted reality: "it is as neighbours, full of ineradicable prejudices, that we must love each other," Butler wrote, "not as fortuitously `separated brethren'." But until quite recently, this acceptance has been only implicit. For many years refuge has been taken instead in wishful thinking about the supposedly temporary and deluded nature of unionism in the North, while little effort was made to present the Republic as somewhere positively worth joining. Yeats, again, hammered away at this idea, in his Senate speeches of the 1920s, remarking in 1926 that an immature nation was a vain nation, vain because it secretly did not believe enough in itself to tell itself the truth. One of the uncomfortable truths which he singled out was that what he called "Cromwellian Ireland" had its own patriotism, and that we should be confident enough to recognise it. "With success comes pride, and with pride comes indifference as to whether people are shown in a good or bad light": if we learned to give up exclusive vanity (based on insecurity), we could achieve inclusive pride.
It is a matter for pride that the Republic near-unanimously voted "Yes" on Friday, accepting unity as an aspiration rather than an aggressive imperative, and endorsing a common citizenship as an option rather than an imposition. The less-decisive but still positive vote on European integration drove home the message further: the Republic no longer resembles the old "Free State" image cherished or execrated by both communities in Northern Ireland. It is neither a theocratic and solipsistic banana republic, nor a green and irredentist Utopia. The fact that over recent years more and more unionists have been venturing south, and the increasing readiness of politicians in the Republic actually to find out something about Northern Ireland for themselves, must be seen as one of the unequivocal gains over the past unhappy era.
Only a year after writing The Discovery of India, Nehru was able to remark that long ago "a tryst with destiny" had been made, "and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge". This language was perhaps unconsciously echoed by Tony Blair, John Hume, and the others who made the Good Friday Agreement. No-one can expect the path ahead to be easy, particularly for the emergent Assembly in Belfast. The voice of the flat-earther, Orange and Green, is still heard in the land. But if the agreement proposals, and their endorsement, show anything, it is an acceptance that the two traditions in Northern Ireland must look to - and at - each other, not at invented enemies or allies across the sea or beyond the Border. It is no use waiting for the barbarians, or the deliverers, from abroad. Instead, the definition of Irishness must be relaxed and broadened at home. This is not the least important of the historic messages registered by voters last Friday.
Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University. His books include Modern Ireland 1600-1972 and W.B. Yeats: A Life.