Ireland

Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History

Hugh F. Kearney

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814749302
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

What is the Irish nation? Who is included in it? Are its borders delimited by religion, ethnicity, language, or civic commitment? And how should we teach its history? These and other questions are carefully considered by distinguished historian Hugh F. Kearney in Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History.

The insightful essays collected here all circle around Ireland, with the first section attending to questions of nationalism and the second addressing pivotal moments in the history and historiography of the isle. Kearney contends that Ireland represents a striking example of the power of nationalism, which, while unique in many ways, provides an illuminating case study for students of the modern world. He goes on to elaborate his revisionist “four nations” approach to Irish history.

In the book, Kearney recounts his own development in the field and the key personalities, departments, and movements he encountered along the way. It is a unique portrait not only of a humane and sensitive historian, but of the historical profession (and the practice of history) in Britain, Ireland, and the United States from the 1940s to the late 20th century-at once public intellectual history and fascinating personal memoir.

Part I
Contested Ideas of Nationhood

In this section I have brought together essays on issues involving nationalism in Ireland, Britain, and to some extent Europe. A work which had considerable impact on me and other historians working in this field is Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany by Rogers Brubaker (1992) which raises key issues of civic and ethnic nationalism. In his comparison of France and Germany, the French emphasis on “civic” identity comes off best. Now, however (2004), the legal ban on Muslim women wearing headscarves (the hijab) in French state schools presents civic nationalism with a challenge. The official identity of the state is secular and the hijab with its religious implications is raising problems of assimilation which are proving difficult to deal with.

In an Irish context, the Cyclops episode in Ulysses illustrates a similar situation. Leopold Bloom, a Jew, claimed to be Irish (“I was born here”) but “the Citizen” representing an ethnic nationalist outlook indignantly rejected this. Within liberal states it would seem that tensions between ethnic and civic attitudes to identity cannot be avoided. Today, for example, the United Kingdom advocates a multiethnic approach toward such problems but here also there seems to be no simple solution to the task of making new immigrants feel “British.” Is the possession of a passport enough or should immigrants be required to learn English and acquire some knowledge of politics, history, and the constitution? In the Irish Republic, so far as recent decades are concerned, emigration—not immigration—was the main problem faced by successive governments. Today, however, the arrival of asylum seekers and economic migrants is creating a situation which, though apparently novel, raises familiar issues of national identity, as the essays presented in this section suggest. The Republic is now a full member of the European Community and in this context the old slogan of “Sinn Fein” (Ourselves Alone) does not have the same resonance.

Chapter One
Contested Ideas of Nationhood, 1800–1995

(1997)

In a recent book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany Rogers Brubaker contrasts the way in which the French define citizenship (ius soli—the law of the soil) according to which those born on French territory are regarded as French, with the German definition which demands familial descent (ius sanguinis—the law of blood). Brubaker sees French citizenship as civic, German nationhood as tribal. The distinction is not merely an academic one since it affects the legal status of immigrants. French national identity encourages acculturation, so that, for example, M. Balladur born of Romanian parents, could be accepted as completely French and able to aspire to the Presidency of France. In contrast German national identity, with its emphasis upon German blood, makes it difficult if not impossible for third- or fourth-generation Turkish immigrants fully fluent in the German language to become German citizens, whereas ethnic Germans, emigrating from Russia and non-German speaking, run into no such difficulties.¹

However, the contrast between France and Germany is not perhaps as sharp as Brubaker makes out. There are many in France who wish to define French national identity in religious terms. For these, Frenchness and Catholicism are inextricably intertwined. It is to this sense of religious identity that M. Le Pen appeals when he points to the dangers, as he sees them, presented by North African immigrants. Le Pen’s sense of French national identity may not be based upon ius sanguinis in a literal sense but it clearly appeals to a sense of ethno-cultural exclusiveness.

This tension between civic and ethnic concepts of national identity in France is not merely a contemporary phenomenon. To take the most notorious example, the Dreyfus case at the end of the nineteenth century revealed how bitterly France was divided upon the issue of anti-Semitism. The key question put by Action-Française was whether French Jews could ever be fully French. During those years the political nation split over whether Frenchness was civic or ethnic, and even within each category there was no agreement as to the necessary criteria (were the French a Celtic nation, for example?). The case for reclaiming German-speaking Alsace-Lorraine rested of course upon the assumption that French identity was civic not ethnic in character. But civic national identity also has its problems. In Brittany, for example, the use of Celtic first names is forbidden by law. In France generally, Muslim schoolgirls are forbidden by the state to cover their heads. French civic identity, in the eyes of the religiously committed, can appear aggressively secularist.

Where have we, the inhabitants of these islands, stood in all this? In a famous article, “Nationality and Liberty,” Sir Lewis Namier argued that British national identity was unproblematic. He stated confidently

The British and Swiss concepts of nationality are primarily territorial: it is the State which created nationality not vice versa... Liberty and self government have moulded the territorial nation of Britain and given content to its communal nationality. The political life of the British island community centres in its Parliament at Westminster, which represents men rooted in British soil. This is a territorial and not a tribal assembly.²

Namier, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, understandably stressed the civic character of British identity. More recently, however, Liah Greenfeld in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity and Linda Colley in Britons: The Forging of a Nation³ have stressed the importance of religion as the essential component of English/British national identity. From this point of view English/British national identity is ethno-cultural not territorial in character. In terms of a contrast between tribal and civic identity, their view suggests that England approximates more to a Le Pen French model than a French civic model. As with France and Germany there is more at stake here than terminology. After the end of World War II, the United Kingdom received a massive influx of immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the West Indies and not least the Republic of Ireland. It matters a great deal to the children of these newcomers in Bradford or Kilburn, what the basis of their nationality is to be, civic or ethnic or a workable compromise. Norman Tebbit’s view is ethnic. “The cricket test—which side do they cheer for? Are you still looking back to where you came from or where you are?”⁴

The contrast between these two concepts of nationhood goes back at least to the French Revolution. It was Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution who put the case for a historic, hereditary concept of a nation stretching back over time: “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.” He declared that “the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one!”

This principle runs through the whole system of their polity. … Church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other. … Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression. Our education is in this manner solely in the hands of ecclesiastics and in all stages from infancy to manhood. By this connection we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church; and we liberalise the church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the country.⁵

From Burke’s point of view the key symbols of the nation were the monarchy, the Church, and the aristocracy. The monarchy and the House of Lords represented the hereditary element in the constitution, but within the House of Commons itself a quasi-hereditary element was also to be found in the persons of the younger sons of the peerage. The established Church itself was also closely linked with the nobility. The bishops sat in the House of Lords by right, but in any case in 1815 eleven of them were of noble birth. In the Church of Ireland, as Halevy tells us, three archbishops and eight bishops came from influential backgrounds.⁶ Three members of the Beresford family were bishops! The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were also key institutions of the established Church. The Protestant Constitution survived the challenge of the French Revolution, unscathed, even strengthened. The implications of all this for citizenship were far-reaching, since it meant that only those who belonged to the established Church were full members of this ethno-cultural state.

There was, however, an alternative view of the English nation which was civic, not ethno-cultural in character. Recent studies have drawn attention to the role of the French Revolution in creating the concept of citizenship. The new French nation which emerged in 1789 was a civic nation replacing the ethno-cultural Catholic nation of the ancien régime. Protestants and Jews could now be full citizens. However, the simplicity of the early vision soon became more complex. Divisions appeared among the revolutionaries, some stressing, as did Robespierre, “liberty, equality and fraternity”; others, like Danton, the importance of “natural frontiers” and the destiny of La Grande Nation. Often indeed French civic nationalism was largely lost to sight amid the political turmoil of the nineteenth century until it re-emerged during the Third Republic.

It was the United States, rather than France, which took the first decisive steps toward a civic national identity (though even here many groups were at first excluded, among them women, blacks, and Indians). Tom Paine’s Rights of Man put the case for civic identity. But Paine was a controversial figure in England. Professor Jim Epstein, in a recent book, mentions how during the 1790s Manchester taverns displayed boards inscribed “No Jacobins admitted here.” Copies of the Rights of Man and effigies of Tom Paine were burned. Peterloo in 1819 was followed by repression when radicalism went into decline.⁷ (Even as late as the Second World War, a statue erected in his birth place at Thetford was tarred and feathered.)

More significant as a spokesman for civic nationhood in an English context was Jeremy Bentham, to whose name may be added that of his intellectual disciple, John Stuart Mill. In 1776 Bentham had provided arguments for use against the American rebels. By 1789, however, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals, he referred to the United States as “that newly created nation, one of the most enlightened if not the most enlightened at this day in the globe.” By 1809 he supported the full radical demand for universal suffrage, secret ballots, annual parliaments, and equal electoral districts. In 1817 he published a Catechism on Reform in which he urged his readers to “look to America.” In his Plan for Parliamentary Reform he spoke of America as the best government that is or ever has been. In America, there was no established Church, no hereditary aristocracy, and no standing army. He attacked the ritual which surrounded monarchy as a “delusion”—a “factitious dignity” designed to mystify the people. America was a “never-to-be expunged reproach to our Matchless Constitution—matchless in rotten boroughs and sinecures.”⁸

Bentham’s hostile attitude toward the existing regime was followed by James Mill and above all by John Stuart Mill, whose work on Representative Government (1861) devoted a long chapter to the issue of nationality. In this chapter, with its emphasis upon consent, we find a more inclusive conception of national identity. Mill stated that, though the Irish had been treated abominably in the past, he believed that recent reforms had led them to accept the benefits of being fellow citizens of “one of the freest as well as the most civilised and powerful nations on earth.”

At the level of general debate, there was perhaps little to choose between the voices of Burke and Coleridge on the one hand and Bentham and Mill on the other. In terms of institutions and political power, however, the balance was heavily weighted in favor of the ethnic identity defended by Burke and against the civic identity espoused by Bentham. The British monarchy successfully repulsed the challenge of the French Revolution. The hereditary character of the Constitution survived in the monarchy and the House of Lords and in other key institutions of Church and State. In the aftermath of Waterloo, the ethno-cultural basis of the British state seemed secure. Fifteen years before Waterloo, however, an event had occurred which had long-lasting unforeseen consequences—the passing in 1800 of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. A new British state had been brought into existence. It was this which makes nonsense of Namier’s view that British nationality was unproblematic. Historians might write of Britain and the British but, as a political unit, Britain had ceased to exist. “Our Island Story” now became “The Story of these Islands.” The simple view that British identity was ethnic was to be subjected to a series of challenges which operated on the assumption that U.K. citizenship was “civic.” The terms “ethnic” and “civic” are modern but the issues raised go back to the period of the American and French Revolutions and they were of course exemplified in the hopes and dreams of the United Irishmen.

In Pitt’s view, the creation of a new British state in 1800 by the Act of Union made good economic sense, uniting as it did the ten million-strong population of Britain with the four million people of Ireland. In wartime, in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion, there were also sound strategic reasons for Britain to take a stronger grip on Ireland. Leaders of the Catholic majority in Ireland were in favor of the Union. Many Irish Catholics who had seen the penal laws against them gradually relaxed since the 1770s as a result of British governmental pressure on the Protestant Ascendancy were willing to accept the Union. Irish Catholics who had been granted the vote in 1793, on the basis of the 40/- freehold franchise, hoped for further concessions. The failure of the 1798 rebellion also strengthened the hand of the conservative Catholics. The Catholic hierarchy in 1799, with only one or two opposing, agreed to accept state payment of the clergy together with a government veto as to “the loyalty of the person appointed.” In the Newry by-election of 1799 Archbishop Troy encouraged Catholic voters to support the pro-Union candidate. Edward Dillon, archbishop of Tuam, braved possible charges of being “an Orange bishop” and came out in favor of the Union. Leaders of the Catholic majority in Ireland were thus in favor of the Union.⁹

There was opposition to Pitt’s Act of Union but it came from members of the Ascendancy and especially from the Orangemen of certain northern counties. Thomas Goold declared:

The Great Creator of the world has given unto our beloved country the gigantic outlines of a Kingdom and not the pigmy features of a province. God and nature, I say, never intended that Ireland shall be a province and by God, she never shall.¹⁰

The ethnic nationalism expressed in these debates was by and large that of the Protestant Ascendancy, which had enjoyed autonomy since 1782 and now saw its freedom threatened by absorption into a wider union dominated by Great Britain. George Ogle spoke of “our happy Constitution in Church and State … founded at the Glorious Revolution: and I will add the Protestant Ascendancy. We have only acted, [he declared] on the defensive in support of the constitution handed down by our Ancestors.”¹¹ This ethnic nationalism was very different from the civic nationalism which had been advocated by Wolfe Tone and others in the United Irishmen movement founded in 1792. As William Drennan put it, “the full and free enjoyment of our rights is absolutely necessary to the performance of our duties … the freedom of the public must necessarily be connected with their virtue as well as their happiness.” As recent research has shown, Paine’s Rights of Man sold more widely in Ireland than it did in Britain. The Northern Star promoted Paine’s ideas. It was reported that at a United Irish dinner in Dublin in 1793 “Tom Paine’s health was drunk with the greatest fervency and enthusiasm.”¹²

The United Irishmen also attempted to politicize fairs, patterns, and other local venues, so much so that the Catholic bishop James Caulfield warned his flock against “all unnecessary meetings, associations, places of pilgrimage or patrons, of diversions and dissipation which can tend to no good.”¹³ In areas such as South Armagh this kind of warning fell on deaf ears, and the United Irishmen were able to recruit from the Catholic “Defender” movement. The 1790s in Ireland, as in England, were marked by a contest between civic and ethnic nationalism, which culminated in the rebellion of 1798, the subsequent defeat of which set back civic nationalism for several generations. Ethnic nationalism in the shape of the Orange Order, founded in 1795, was triumphant.

In Scotland, events took a somewhat different turn. During the 1790s the United Irishmen urged the Scots to follow the example of earlier heroes, such as William Wallace, George Buchanan, and Fletcher of Saltoun. But British unionism proved to be stronger than Scottish nationalism.¹⁴ Scots radicals set up a British Convention and called themselves the “United Britains,” not the “United Scotsmen.” But civic nationalism in Scotland, as in Ireland, was defeated. Its leader Thomas Muir fled to France where he clashed with Wolfe Tone in competing for French military assistance. It is interesting to note in all this that civic nationalism made little or no headway in the Gaelic-speaking areas of either Ireland or Scotland. Civic nationalism implied literacy in English, as its counterpart in France demanded literacy in French. As the work of Brendan O Buachalla has shown, Jacobitism was extraordinarily strong in Gaelic-speaking Ireland during the eighteenth century. As a consequence, civic nationalism had little foundation on which to build in such areas.

In Ireland during the 1790s, the religious leaders of the Catholic majority showed no enthusiasm for the civic nationalism of the United Irishmen. However, when the A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: On Being a Historian in Four Countries
• Nationalism: The Case of Ireland—An Introduction
• PART I: Contested Ideas of Nationhood
• PART II: Contested Ideas of National History
• Index
• About the Author