New Left Review 212, July/August 1995
Robin Blackburn
Ireland and the NLR
The nlr’s record of publication on Ireland is indeed a patchy one, though not as lacking in substance as is claimed by Sam Porter and Denis O’Hearn. We should certainly have published much more than we did over the last twenty-five years, but what we did publish does not deserve the slighting references made by our correspondents—perusal of it would also have shown that their generic indictment was unjust.
Porter and O’Hearn do not address the central arguments to be found in our coverage of Northern Ireland. Our perspective on Northern Irish politics has been embedded in analysis of uk politics as a whole. Those issues of nlr which featured extended analysis of uk politics also featured attacks on the role of the British state in Northern Ireland—for example, nlr 70 (1972), nlr 130 (1981), nlr 140 (1983), and nlr 158 (1986). In nlr 70 I argued that the British state’s impasse in Ireland would contribute to the defeat of the Heath government and its Irish policy but pointed to an aspect of the situation which Porter and O’Hearn make light of: ‘In the six counties of Northern Ireland, a violent clash is now under way between two forces neither of which can offer any long-run solutions. . .So long as British Imperialism can count on the fanatical support of the majority of the population in the North nothing can dislodge it.’ I pointed out that the ira would contribute to the destruction of the Stormont regime: ‘The importance of this intermediate objective is that it can create conditions for destroying the unity of the Orange class bloc. The whole Stormont state structure is, after all, an engine of Protestant privilege designed to secure the support of the Protestant petty bourgeoisie and working class.’ But I doubted that the Provisional ira would adopt tactics calculated to win over a layer of Protestants. After more in this vein I concluded: ‘The misery of the super-exploited and specially oppressed minority in the North provides fertile soil for any campaign against British military presence. This, together with the almost equally miserable conditions of the Protestant workers, is the most dangerous time-bomb menacing British capitalism in Ireland. . .’ [1]
As it happened Stormont and the Heath government’s ‘power-sharing’ policy were broken by a general strike of loyalist workers while the Heath government itself was ejected by an election held in the middle of the British miners’ strike. Tom Nairn, nlr’s most prolific writer on uk topics, then developed the argument that the United Kingdom was a pre-modern polity and that democracy demanded the Break-Up of Britain (the title of his 1977 book on the subject, comprising articles many of which had appeared in the nlr). [2] Having bothered to take an interest in what we publish it is rather odd that Porter and O’Hearn fail even to notice this important—and surely ‘substantial’—strand in the work of the Review. Nairn’s analysis stressed that, for good or ill, nationalism furnished a necessary stage in the evolution of popular consciousness and thus a prerequisite for the development of any democratic polity. So far as Northern Ireland was concerned the break-up of the uk, and the nationalist imperative, meant that Ulster would have to find its own identity, freed from any tutelage by Westminster and without any British military presence. Eric Hobsbawm critically assessed what he saw as the dangers of this approach in a review of the book in nlr 105. [3] Nairn’s ‘break-up of Britain’ approach was developed in a number of later essays in the Review, notably an article in nlr 130 published in the closing months of 1981 where Nairn argued that ‘British state power has manoeuvred itself into a cul-de-sac where the only choices are paralysing intransigence or withdrawal. . .The only strategy offering any hope is. . .to be conciliatory about the prisoners and “tough” about military withdrawal and forcing self-government upon the province. . .Ireland has become simply a daily de-legitimation of state authority. . .Here is another potent infection of the social climate, with far worse to follow.’ Writing a little over two years before the miners’ strike Nairn warned that repression in Northern Ireland was being studied with a view to application on the mainland. [4] Nairn’s distinctive analysis rates inclusion in the most comprehensive recent survey of explanations for the conflict in Northern Ireland as a special sub-sector of ‘red’, as opposed to ‘green’ or ‘orange’, Marxism. [5]
nlr is primarily a journal of analysis and debate, without a homogeneous position on Northern Ireland, but it has repeatedly published attacks on the role of the British state there, for example by Ken Livingstone in nlr 140, Tony Benn and Eric Heifer in nlr 158 and Tony Benn in nlr 190. Ken Livingstone argued: ‘Unless the [Labour] party changes its attitude on Ireland, a new Labour Government would find itself using the apparatus of repression in Ireland from the first day it is in office. . .[A] Labour Secretary of State [would be] responsible for internment, trial without jury, deaths of children via plastic bullets and all the horrendous things which previous Labour Governments have done. . .We have to go into an election pledged to withdrawal within two years. That’s the maximum time you can allow for a transition based on a negotiated disengagement.’ [6]
The contribution of Livingstone, Heffer and Benn to raising Irish issues in British political life was outstanding and they should surely have been numbered among the ‘honourable exceptions’ referred to by Porter and O’Hearn in their over-generalized and sectarian critique. Similarly, Paul Foot and Chris Mullin also waged campaigns against a number of the more notorious miscarriages of justice produced by the British state’s policy in Ireland. Foot also composed a strong case for British withdrawal. These British leftists did not endorse the republican slaughter of ‘civilians’ and ‘wrong targets’—numbering 597 people between 1969 and 1989. But they did call for the withdrawal of British troops and for a halt to many specific acts of repression. [7]
In the seventies and eighties most of the Labour Left and the Marxist Left in Britain organized for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. But the circumstances created by the bombs and bullets of the Provisional ira did not favour the development of a mass campaign. Indeed republican military actions were presumably aimed at bringing about a change in the attitudes of the rulers rather than fostering popular opposition in Britain to the government.
When Porter and O’Hearn criticize the ‘British Left’ it may be that they are attacking mainly the record of the leaders of the Labour Party, in which case their observations are closer to the mark. In recent years the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major eventually took initiatives on Ireland that were more radical than anything known to have been contemplated by previous Labour governments. Following Sinn Fein’s decision to participate in elections it registered gains which may have helped to galvanize Downing Street into action. The 1986 Anglo-Irish agreement began timidly diluting British sovereign claims over Northern Ireland. [8] The Downing Street declaration of December 1993 went much further down this path and elicited the ira ceasefire. It was in this context that we published an article by Henry Patterson and Ellen Hazelkorn on the Irish Republic, adding to it our own editorial argument that the ‘subvention’ should and could be met from European Union funds—a point simply ignored by Porter and O’Hearn. We also reflected on what might replace British jurisdiction in the North: ‘Autonomy and power-sharing in Ulster needs an enhanced European dimension as well as an Anglo-Irish accord. An Irish nationalism which worked within the framework of the European Union would also maximize the opportunity for weaning many loyalists from the notion that they are simply British. The Europe of 1996 will be very different from that of 1956, let alone 1916, and will have to accommodate plural identities and overlapping jurisdictions.’
These formulations were an attempt to explore the implications of the peace process now under way and of the relativization of notions of sovereignty in contemporary Europe. The complete demilitarization of Northern Ireland, including the disarming of the Protestant paramilitaries, is very much to be desired. Westminster’s demand for a unilateral republican decommissioning is unreasonable and a refusal to budge from it would be very dangerous. Porter and O’Hearn themselves point to the large numbers of unionists who have access to arms and it has always been their potential military striking power which has stood in the way of the project of unification.
The terms in which we all approach Northern Ireland have been changed over the last few years. The end of the Cold War reduced the British state’s strategic concern with Northern Ireland. The military mobilization of unionists is less formidable than it was in the seventies. British military involvement is seen by Westminster as an expensive embarrassment. The United Kingdom seems headed for a severe crisis on the mainland which can only make even more untenable its pretensions in Northern Ireland. The mere existence of a continuing armed struggle, whatever its bloody errors and brutality, contributed to a wearing down of uk identity and the assertion of a distinctive Irish tradition. On the other hand the waning of the epoch of classic nation states in Europe has implications for Irish nationalism as well. Though not so widely noted, cultural developments have contributed in an important way. The cultural dynamism of Irish nationalism, and its growing accommodation with civic pluralism, open up greater possibilities for the bridging of Northern and Southern identities. [9]
Porter and O’Hearn denounce some phrases from Eric Hobsbawm’s lecture at great length. If he had been aware of the very recently published pamphlet they cite he might have qualified his remark about British military policy. He was, in fact, giving a lecture in support of the very organization, Amnesty, which did publicize the resort to torture by British security personnel. Both in the lecture and in his many other writings Eric Hobsbawm has entered the most severe judgement of European colonialism. In The Age of Revolution he described the Great Irish Famine as ‘by far the largest human tragedy in European history’ during the period he was writing about. Bracketing it together with the famines in India he clearly indicted British colonialism as well as British capitalism. In The Age of Capital Hobsbawm drew attention to the way in which the Fenians pioneered the revolutionary nationalism of the twentieth century—but also observed their confessional limitations and preparedness to allow armed struggle to displace social and class questions. [10]
The various observations and reflections to which I have alluded show Porter and O’Hearn to be too sweeping in their criticisms. Nevertheless we should have published more, addressing more specifically what might be demanded by joint self-determination for the two main communities. As Northern Irish politics develop in somewhat more hopeful times we hope to greatly improve this record in future.
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New Left Review 212, July/August 1995
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