Politics & Power Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri’s line is a deliberate wrenching-away of the easy story. Northern Ireland gets flattened, especially outside the island, into a timeless religious feud: Protestants versus Catholics, faith as destiny. He insists that frame is not just lazy but politically convenient, because it disguises the actual engine room of the conflict: sovereignty, identity, and state power. Calling it “a nationalist conflict” shifts responsibility from theology to institutions, borders, policing, and who gets to claim legitimacy.

The provocative pivot is his claim that “the Catholic church was the only church at that time.” Taken literally, it’s historically contestable; taken rhetorically, it functions as a scalpel. He’s puncturing the idea that “religion” itself caused the rupture. Even where denominational labels mattered, they often operated as shorthand for communal allegiance, class position, and constitutional preference. Religion becomes the badge, not the blueprint.

Context matters: Holkeri wasn’t a historian arguing in a seminar; he was a Finnish politician and diplomat who later chaired UN talks in Kosovo. His worldview is that ethnic or sectarian explanations can become fatalistic alibis, while nationalism is negotiable because it has levers: rights, autonomy, constitutional guarantees, recognition. The subtext is pragmatic and slightly admonishing: stop treating violence as ancient hatred and you can start treating it as a solvable political dispute.