Ireland’s internationalism is put in sharp focus on St Patrick’s Day by global celebrations, diasporic events and worldwide ministerial visits – a welcome change from everyday insularity.
Ireland’s international awareness arises from our experience of empire. The imperial and post-imperial dimensions are underappreciated or ignored in debates on this State’s interests and values, yet they continue to animate popular understandings and preferences of what they ought to be.
Two recent historical studies enlighten the issues at stake. The Irish-American historian Paul A. Townend’s 2016 book The Road to Home Rule, Anti-imperialism and the Irish National Movement examines in detail how modern Irish nationalism was framed by Britain’s Afghan, Zulu, Egyptian, Boer and Sudanese imperial wars in the crucial period 1877-1886, when the Parnellite-Fenian New Departure was created. He argues convincingly that the foundations of Ireland’s distinctive anti-imperial nationalism and British-Irish imperial unionism were laid down enduringly in those few years.
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The Irish Revolution, A Global History, published last year in New York and edited by Edinburgh- and Belfast-based historians Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry, brings together 11 chapters on the comparative, transnational and global contexts of the 1916-1923 period. Korean, Russian, European, Algerian and African-American perspectives and links are examined along with thematic political and personal networks.
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The interconnectedness and international ‘contemporeanity’ of these events with those in Ireland are stressed. Simultaneous collapses of Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires alongside the survival of Britain’s empire, and the emergence of the United States as a likely successor to British power, are analysed as ingredients of the Irish events. New boundaries and states emerged in Europe from these empires, with many Irish parallels.
The future of British rule in India and Egypt was foregrounded in Lloyd George’s conduct of the war in Ireland. Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the British imperial staff, wrote: “If we lose Ireland, we lose the empire”. As the editors put it, the “primary rationale behind these new forms of statehood devised by London in the aftermath of the first World War”, from Palestine to India, “was to contain nationalist demands within a reconfigured imperial framework rather than to satisfy local democratic aspirations.”
The editors emphasise how important international media were in fighting the Irish War of Independence. Michael Collins told the Dáil’s representative in Rome: “Real progress is much more to be estimated by what is thought abroad than by what is thought at home.” Similarly, the commander-in-chief in Ireland, General Nevil Macready, acknowledged: “This propaganda business is the strongest weapon [Sinn Féin] has.”
Media were similarly important during the 1877-1985 Home Rule crisis, informing Irish readers about comparable events elsewhere in the British and other European empires during this hectic period of imperial expansion, and reporting events in Ireland to an international audience.
Townend documents in vivid detail how well informed Irish readers were on Afghan, Egyptian, Indian, Zulu and Boer developments. They became part and parcel of the Home Rule story, pitching Irish anti-imperial nationalism against jingoistic imperial expansion. This cut across the readiness of Home Rule political elites to find a more stable Irish settlement within a reformed empire. The intensity and vehemence of Irish anti-imperial feeling laid down then convinced British Tory and many Liberal leaders that Irish nationalism was treasonous and could not be accommodated. That became an abiding feature of unionism, too, over the following century.
Such historical analyses of crisis periods help us understand how their outcomes endure in political and popular culture for long periods thereafter and continue to influence public policy, understandings and preferences.
Ireland’s internationalism is a case in point. Anti-imperial nationalism has an internationalism aspiring to self-government qualitatively different from imperial nationalism geared to maintaining domination.
Anti-imperial nationalism drove Ireland’s gradual shift from British dominion status to formal independence from the 1920s to 1949. It was central to Ireland’s anti-colonial stance in the United Nations from the 1950s. It informs the willingness to share sovereignty with larger and smaller post-imperial European states in the EEC/EU from the 1970s, to escape dependence on Britain. It helps explain the strength and appeal of Ireland’s diaspora, including in the US.
It also underlies Ireland’s military neutrality, even in the new geopolitical setting of Russia’s imperial invasion of Ukraine, to which Irish people are spontaneously and generously opposed. Power-projecting alliances still remind Irish voters of imperial domination. Neutrality requires more funding and greater political resources. Its anti-imperial values remain relevant in a conflicted world shifting towards a more equal, multipolar distribution of power.
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