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10 ‘Practically a foreign country’?1 In 1966, Tim Pat Coogan suggested that ‘the level of physical contact between North and South is low. The average Southerner does not go North either for holidays or day excursions.’2 Two years later, a British writer contended that ‘to the majority of people in the Irish Republic … Ulster is practically a foreign country … Most Southern Irishmen have never been “up there” and they seem to have little desire to go.’ He quoted a Waterford businessman who told him that ‘Northern Ireland just doesn’t come into the sweep of my
6 The past, a foreign country: time, space, and the Scottishness of the Scottish Legendary ‘The past is a foreign country’: the quotation from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between aptly encapsulates how intimately the past and notions of spatiality are intertwined.1 The Scottish Legendary, like all hagiographic works, is also fundamentally concerned with, on the one hand, constructing the Christian past and imagining the future for all believers, and, on the other hand, mapping the spread of the faith and its centres of religious activity. Since time and space
in foreign countries, including some considered to have an ideology hostile to the West, humanitarian organizations strategically turned to simple narratives in their visual appeals to depoliticize the context. Typically, the child constituted a figure that was ‘ideologically neutral’ ( Cosandey, 1998 : 5). Similarly, the focus on relief operations and benevolent workers helped to shape moral responsibilities of Western viewers to act in solidarity ‘based on need and not on identity’ ( Barnett, 2011 : 84). However, humanitarian motives were not free of sectarian
Divisions between north and south Ireland were prevalent since the 1920s. Yet, until the 1970s, nobody in public life in the Republic of Ireland argued that partition was justified. This book examines in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society during the period 1968-79. It begins with the aftermath of the civil rights march in Derry in October 1968 and traces the reaction to the events until the autumn of 1972. The impact of August 1969, the aftermath of internment and the response to Bloody Sunday are examined. The book looks at violence south of the border, particularly bombings and shootings and their human cost, and examines state security, censorship and the popular protests associated with these issues. A general outlook at the changing attitudes to refugees and northern nationalists is provided before describing the impact of the conflict on southern Protestants. The controversies concerning the Irish Republican Army and their activities are highlighted. The book looks at the question of revisionism and how debates about history were played out in academia as well as at a popular level. A variety of social and cultural responses to the conflict are examined, including attitudes to Britain and northern Unionists. For many southerners, Ulster was practically a foreign country and Northern Ireland did not seem very Irish. By 1979, the prospect of an end to the conflict seemed dim.
accelerates. Time means steps forward or backward, rise or fall. The Past is a Foreign Country by David Lowenthal had a broad impact with its anthropological look at the past. As the title suggests, and as the content of the book confirms, the idea is that the present has been alienated from the past. The past has become different, remote, and exotic – a “foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985 : xvi, 406; 2015:3f, 8ff, 358ff). Lowenthal’s title was taken from the author L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, whose opening sentence is, “The past is a foreign country: they
must have been difficult for Palmerston to stop himself taking advantage and meddling, given ‘the strong desire which the noble Lord had invariably manifested to interfere on every occasion with other nations’.24 Walpole similarly felt that the principle behind Palmerston’s policy was ‘to interfere in the internal affairs of foreign countries’.25 In his view that would lead to ‘perpetual confusion and disquietude’.26 To the Protectionists, the bullying of a weaker nation was particularly repugnant. In Stanley’s view, the honour of the British flag was ‘prostituted
reports, fiction and films, public fear and contemporary scandal combined to generate and sustain these contradictory beliefs. Yet it has not been sufficiently established if these beliefs in the journey as a site of romantic opportunity and sexual hazard were substantive or primarily myth. Undertaking a closer examination of this dichotomy reveals once again both the power of female journeyer agency and the continued power of British social convention and practices. The romantic and sexual journey abroad By the 1880s travel within foreign countries had become broadly
field, to be an irreproachable pragmatic policy on the part of the Yugoslavs that, as this chapter shows, secured a total victory over ideological perplexities. The Yugoslav Federal Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (FCCR) 3 signed, from the mid-1950s on, bilateral exchange programs with several Eastern (the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania) and Western European countries (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway), but also Middle East and African countries such as Syria, Lebanon, and Kenya
Heritage is everywhere David Lowenthal’s classic The Past is a Foreign Country opens with the sentence “The past is everywhere”, and he used exactly the same words three decades later when he revisited that country (Lowenthal 1985 : xv; 2015: 1). The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History begins in much the same way, but here the past has been limited to heritage: “ALL AT ONCE HERITAGE IS EVERYWHERE – in the news, in the movies, in the marketplace – in everything from galaxies to genes” (Lowenthal 1997 : ix). The phrase “Heritage everywhere” is
Within the historical context of Serbia's initial military success, this chapter examines the early work of British women in the East. The first Serbian Relief Units travelled to the Balkans as early as autumn 1914, in time to provide medical care during the typhus epidemic that raged across Serbia during the winter of 1914-15. In Russia there were a number of British initiatives from women ex-patriots living there. The chapter seeks to contextualize the early work within the historical framework of women as military nurses in foreign countries with very different cultures.