Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 6

Charles Townshend sums up the achievement of revolutionary nationalism by the time of the Treaty negotiations in December 1921 as follows:

Physical force, whether or not as a result of its alliance with politically sophisticated Sinn Féin, had demonstrably worked. It had extracted from the British concessions which they had hitherto refused. It had prised open, in the more dramatic metaphor preferred by its adherents, England’s grip on twenty-six out of the thirty-two counties of Ireland.²⁷

Yet since physical force was incapable, in the words of the IRA’s effective commander, Michael Collins, of ‘beating the British out of Ireland militarily’,²⁸ the militant nationalist aspiration for a republic was to be disappointed. The limit of British concession was to be dominion status within the British Empire and Commonwealth and, most offensive of all to the purer republicans, the provision for members of the parliament of the new Irish Free State to take an oath of allegiance to the British monarch as head of the Commonwealth.

The debate on the Treaty split Sinn Féin and the IRA and led to a bitter civil war between the ‘Free State’ forces, which lost over 800 dead, and the anti-treaty ‘Republican’ forces, which lost many more. Casualties were far in excess of the numbers of Irish Volunteers killed in the period between 1916 and 1921.²⁹ On the republican side in the Dáil the predominant concerns were issues like the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, which symbolised the profound distance separating a 26-county British dominion from the republic proclaimed in 1916. Many commentators since have attempted to explain what one Treaty supporter disparagingly referred to as the ‘mystical, hysterical, neurotic worship of “The Republic”’.³⁰

Part of the explanation must be sought in the necessary amorphousness of the political and social ideologies of the revolutionary elite. Predominantly lower middle-class professionals, journalists and teachers, their origins lay disproportionately in the ascending class in post-Famine Ireland, the rural middle class. Their thinking about the economic and social dimensions of ‘freedom’ tended towards pieties about the need to avoid the extremes of capitalism and socialism and the massive industrial conurbations of Britain and other capitalist states, with their unhealthy polarisation of classes brought about by excessive disparities of income. Thus even the paper published by Arthur Griffith, the most vigorous advocate of tariff-based capitalist economic development, denounced the evils of the English factory system and ‘dreamed in Wellsian terms of technological revolutions that would make such developments unnecessary in Ireland’.³¹ Socialism and trade union militancy were often seen as twin examples of ‘foreign’ doctrines likely to divide the nation. Gaelic revivalism with its references to a ‘pre-conquest’ utopia of co-operative Gemeinschaft reinforced this approach, as did the Catholic Church’s attitude to social questions, based on Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, with its discussion of the twin evils of socialist internationalism and the doctrine of the class struggle.³² Rejecting certain features of industrial capitalism while leaving unquestioned the current economic realities in Ireland, Sinn Féin was able to represent itself as a more profound challenge to British rule than the ‘bourgeois’ Parliamentary Party while not disturbing the equilibrium of its wealthier supporters.

But precisely because the substance of Sinn Féin economic and social philosophy was an accommodation with the main lines of development of the post-Famine economic order, its rhetoric of difference with the Parliamentary Party took on a largely moralistic and ‘principled’ tone. This meant that it would prove difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the Sinn Féin elite to avoid a split when faced with such an impure settlement as the Treaty. For of course the Treaty was a compromise brought about by the realities of relative military and economic power. For many in the Sinn Féin leadership, just as the inspiring memory of a higher Gaelic civilisation would prove sufficient to insulate an independent Ireland from the ‘excesses’ of capitalism, so another act of revolutionary will would force the British finally to concede the unalloyed Republic. Despite the overwhelmingly political and constitutional focus of the Treaty debates, there was a link between the capacity of revolutionary nationalism to spiritualise real social and economic antagonisms into a language of ‘principles’ and abstract freedom, and its profound difficulty in adjusting to a situation in which the criteria which had so often been used to marginalise ‘sectional’ projects like that of labour, could now be turned against those who would settle for something less than complete independence.

The anti-Treaty position was given major social sustenance by the large reservoirs of agrarian dissatisfaction, particularly in Connaught, which would prove much more active in the Civil War than it had in the War of Independence. For many small farmers and farm labourers, republican intransigence was very clearly a function of perceived class interest. The defeat of the republicans would be accompanied by the simultaneous defeat of the remnants of agrarian radicalism: in Meath, Clare and Waterford pro-Treaty forces physically repressed small farmers’ and labourers’ militancy.³³

As his cause went down to defeat, a leading anti-Treatyite would produce in prison the few brief notes on which much of the subsequent vocation of social republicanism based itself. Liam Mellows wrote to Austin Stack, who before the Civil War had been successively Minister of Justice and Minister of Home Affairs and was now a prominent anti-Treatyite. Mellows expressed his dissatisfaction with the republicans’ apolitical approach, which ‘could only judge of situations in terms of guns and men’.³⁴ He was influenced by an editorial in a recent edition of the Workers’ Republic, the newspaper of the tiny Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), which had urged a social and economic programme capable of winning the masses to the support of the Republic. Mellows pressed the republican leadership to set up a government and to translate the Dáil’s 1919 Democratic Programme into ‘something definite. This is essential if the great body of workers are to be kept on the side of Independence.’ A more specific social programme was justified by his interpretation of the Treaty split which showed that,

the commercial interest, so called, money and gombeen men are on the side of the Treaty. We are back to Tone … relying on ‘the men of no property’. The ‘stake in the country’ people were never with the Republic … We should recognise that definitely now and base our appeals upon the understanding and needs of those who have always borne Ireland’s fight.

As the only radical document to be produced by a republican during the period, Mellows’s Jail Notes were to become a major inspiration for leftist republicans – especially after his execution at the hands of the Free State government. Charles Townshend refers to him as ‘the lone socialist within the leadership’.³⁵ This judgment at once inflates the socialist component of Mellows’s outlook and encourages an underestimation of his longer-term significance. Only 21 when he met Connolly in 1913, he was already well integrated into the physical force underground tradition through his membership first of the republican ‘boy scout’ movement, Fianna Éireann, and subsequently of the IRB. His horizons are well summed up in his declaration to his mother in 1913, ‘I’m going to be another Robert Emmet.’³⁶ Emmet had led a confused and doomed insurrection in Dublin in 1803, gaining entry to the republican pantheon largely through his florid speech from the dock and subsequent execution. Roy Foster’s judgment on Mellows’s hero is acerbic: ‘His ideas were those of elite separatism: neither social idealism nor religious equality appear to have figured.’³⁷ A leader of the 1916 insurrection in Galway, Mellows then spent some time in the United States, where he displayed signs of being influenced by Connolly’s Labour in Irish History – though what took his attention was its assertion that capitalism was a foreign import and that pre-Conquest Ireland was a ‘communistic clan’ society.³⁸

Mellows’s real significance becomes more apparent if certain dissonances in the Jail Notes are acknowledged. Thus he suggested that the new social programme should follow the lines of the CPI’s strategy calling for state control of industry, transport and the banks, as well as the seizure and division of ‘the lands of the aristocracy’.³⁹ At the same time, he claimed that such a programme ‘does not require a change of outlook on the part of republicans, or the adoption of a revolutionary programme as such’. Although the IRA Executive had begun to develop a more radical land policy, it was at the very least ingenuous to suggest that the sort of specifically radical programme that the CPI was demanding would have been welcome to the great majority of the anti-Treaty leaders. Their moralistic republicanism would have bitterly resisted any ‘reduction’ of their cause to a class movement.

More fundamentally, the apparent radicalisation of Mellows’s republicanism simply served to provide another means of avoiding the realities of popular acceptance of the Treaty. The pro-Treaty position was conveniently ascribed to a rump of ‘pro-imperialist’ moneyed elements who, with the help of the British and the support of the Catholic Church and the ‘unprincipled’ leadership of the labour movement, were hoodwinking the people. As a radical nationalist, Mellows assumed the fundamental unity of the nation. Apart from the West British bourgeois excrescences, any divisions amongst the people were artificially fostered by ‘Imperialism’. This conjured out of existence realities like the Ulster Unionists, and in the 26-county area it reduced the substantial support for the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (until 1930 the political and trade union wings of the Irish labour movement were organically linked), which had given de facto support to the Treaty, to the question of the supposed corruption of its leadership: ‘The official Labour Movement has deserted the people for the fleshpots of the Empire.’ In fact, in the elections earlier in 1922 the ILPTUC had won almost as much support as the anti-Treatyites, with seventeen of its eighteen candidates elected.⁴⁰

That there was more to the question than a corrupt leadership was at least partly recognised when, in his letter to Stack, Mellows mentioned a visit made by leaders of the ILPTUC to the republicans occupying the Four Courts in Dublin (it would be the shelling of the Four Courts by the pro-Treaty supporters that signalled the beginning of the Civil War): ‘They remarked that no effort had been made to put the Democratic Programme into execution.’⁴¹ Mellows concluded, therefore, that the working class was ‘naturally’ for the Republic, but had been temporarily alienated by the inadequate policies of the republican movement. That for many workers the Treaty was a regrettable but necessary compromise that could be built on, while the anti-Treaty cause threatened only a barren, internecine and destructive conflict, was not a thought that a republican like Mellows, no matter how radical some of his language, could contemplate.

What Mellows really signifies is not a turn to socialist republicanism but the first of a number of attempts to preserve intransigent revolutionary nationalism by tapping into perceived social discontent. Thus in a late communication he takes up the issue of unemployment:

The unemployment question is acute. Starvation is facing thousands of people … The Free State government’s attitude towards striking postal workers makes clear what its attitude towards workers generally would be. The situation created by all these must be utilised for the Republic. The position must be defined: Free State-Capitalism and Industrialism-Empire; Republic-Workers-Labour.⁴²

All the ambiguity of social republicanism is in those lines: the Free State is identified with a mode of production – capitalism – but the Republic has no stated foundation except in solidarity with the vaguely defined cause of Labour. It was symptomatic that Mellows should have referred in his Jail Notes to Wolfe Tone and the ‘men of no property’. The Dublin Protestant who, with the assistance of Belfast Presbyterian radicals, would found the Society of United Irishmen in 1791 and play a crucial role in the events which culminated in the 1798 Rebellion, was subsequently canonised as the ‘Father of Republicanism’.⁴³ In 1796 Tone had written:

Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community – the men of no property.⁴⁴

Rather than an ‘embryonic socialist statement’,⁴⁵ this is a middle-class revolutionary’s acknowledgement that in certain circumstances it may be necessary to make an instrumental and risky appeal to the ‘lower orders’. As Richard Dunphy has noted of the limits of republican egalitarianism when it used the rhetoric of Tone,

What was under attack was the notion of aristocracy, not the existence of socio-economic inequalities. The old, Anglo-Irish ruling class, together with the large farmers, the ranchers, distinguished by blood, by titles would make way for those who had worked their way to the top. Hard work, forbearance, meritocracy – these were the corner-stones of the egalitarian faith of the republicans. Such a man, having worked his way to success, would not be a bourgeois but a patriot.⁴⁶

This ambiguous populist egalitarianism would prove to be a potent resource for those who, in the next few decades, would indeed rework republicanism in a constitutional and ‘radical’ direction under the leadership of Eamon de Valera and the new political formation, Fianna Fáil.

The cross-class alliance of the War of Independence did not split along clear lines of class, but its ending released the defeated side from some of the restraints that had prevented Sinn Féin from taking up economic and social issues. Of course, there were still many in the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin and IRA who maintained a position of rigid and abstract opposition. The Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 by a ‘Provisional Government’ had based its claim to the allegiance ‘of every Irishman and Irishwoman’ on a ‘right’ established by past insurrections: a real turn towards the solipsistic and self-referential, and away from those within the physical force tradition who still accepted the provision of the 1873 Irish Republican Brotherhood constitution forbidding its ‘Supreme Council’ from initiating a war with England until they had the support of the mass of the people.⁴⁷ By the end of the Civil War there was much evidence of what Townshend describes as:

a Robespierrist vision of the public good … A sense of democratic values existed, but it was modified by the belief that Sinn Féin understood what ought to be the will of the people if they were sufficiently nationally aware.⁴⁸

Thus Mary MacSwiney, one of the most prominent of Sinn Féin diehards in the inter-war period, gave a typical response to the popular majority for the Treaty:

The people of a nation may not voluntarily surrender their independence, they may not vote it away in the ballot box even under duress and if some, even a majority be found, who through force or cupidity, would vote for such a surrender, the vote is invalid legally and morally and a minority is justified in upholding the independence of their country.⁴⁹

Increasingly, however, the lack of popular credibility of such purism began to force a degree of rethinking in Sinn Féin and the IRA. This was aided by the increasingly clear conservatism of the governing party, now called Cumann na nGaedheal, which helped to ‘socialise’ the Civil War fracture. The first post-Mellows attempt to associate the republicans more clearly with social radicalism came in a number of articles written by Constance Markievicz for the Scottish socialist paper Forward and republished as a pamphlet, ‘What Irish Republicans Stand For’. As a close friend of Connolly’s and a member of the Irish Citizens’ Army who had received a death sentence (commuted because of her sex) for her role in the 1916 Rising, Markievicz was the Sinn Féin leader most able to put a red gloss on republicanism.

The basic theme represents a Gaelicised version of Connolly. Thus Britain had spent 800 years trying to replace the ‘Gaelic State’ with the ‘Feudal Capitalist State’. The Free State was a further attempt to force ‘the English social and economic system’ on the Irish people. However there was resistance, as the people ‘cling instinctively and with a passionate loyalty to the ideals of a better civilisation, the tradition of which is part of their subconscious, spiritual and mental state’. Connolly’s admiration for ‘his Celtic forefathers, who foreshadowed in the democratic organisation of the Irish clans, the more perfect organisation of the free society of the future’, was quoted and linked to the claim that popular support for republicanism existed because ‘the ideals embodied in that Republic touched all that was most vital and most Gaelic in the imagination and race memory of the people.’ The Treaty was depicted as a counter-revolution ‘for the purpose of breaking up the development of the Co-operative Commonwealth in Ireland’.⁵⁰

This was rewriting history with a dazzling mixture of red and green inks, and Markievicz clearly had difficulty in providing her readers with examples of revolutionary republicanism in action. Some were pure fabrications: the Democratic Programme was said to have been drawn up by de Valera and, perhaps even more incredibly, to ‘emphasise and develop the ideals of the Gaelic state’, predictably unspecified. Other instances may not have impressed many Scottish socialists: describing her stint as Minister for Labour, she spoke of how, ‘The people, both employers and workers, believed in the justice of their own Republican government, and of our desire to act fairly, and to secure the best for the worker without ruining the employer.’ There was an appeal to Irish shopkeepers, ‘if they [did] not want their children to be reduced to the condition of starving wage slaves’, to join the workers in reorganising businesses on ‘true co-operative lines’.⁵¹

This attempt to inflate republican social radicalism was one of the earliest indications of a move by a section of the anti-Treatyites from purity to politics and a more populist republicanism centring on economic protectionism – ‘Why encourage the peaceful penetration of Ireland by English capitalism?’ and a distinctive Irish strategy of balanced economic development:

We should guard against the conquest of Ireland by foreign capital, and the development of her villages along the lines that have created the ‘Black Country’ and the this-world Hells to be found in Glasgow, Liverpool and all British industrial cities.⁵²

Behind the whimsical mystifications there was a clear attempt to establish the popular credentials of the key republican political leader, Eamon de Valera, whose ‘noble simplicity of life’ was contrasted with the Free State government: ‘the future aristocracy of Ireland … who are rolling around in limousines and acquiring fine residences’. Markievicz’s articles represent the first substantial attempt by republicans to use class discontents and a populist Gaelic version of Connolly to criticise the new state. The mystificatory and manipulative version of this strategy embodied in these writings would soon be contested by a more substantial version from within the IRA itself.