History
After Fianna Fáil won the election of 1932, the Cumann na nGaedheal Government chose to cede power peacefully to its former civil war opponents. This did not usher in democratic stability though, as Fianna Fáil continued to depict itself as an all-encompassing national movement and Cumann na nGaedheal tried to reinvent itself in ways that failed to accept the normality of opposition. First, they tried to form a cult of personality around W. T. Cosgrave, and then, when that failed, they incorporated some of the strategies of continental fascism. In so doing, they again attempted to define politics as best embodied in a single national movement with a strong nationalist leader. It was only after the failure of the turn toward fascism that Irish politics truly became accepting of multiparty democracy.
Once the Anglo-Irish Treaty was passed, the pro-Treatyites had to set up a functioning democratic state. In this, they were influenced by a variety of competing factors. They valued multiparty democracy, but also were used to a politics that worked through a single party speaking for an allegedly monolithic nation. They also valued the creation of a Gaelic state: a new Irish way of organising a state and a society that broke with British models in crucial ways. In particular, they wanted to set up a state that avoided the conflicts inherent in the British two-party system. Throughout 1922, there were attempts to set up a democratic state but also repeated calls for a politics that minimised conflict. Throughout the year, politicians debated the founding principles of the new state, from theories of representation to the characteristics of an ideal representative.
A new analysis of the difficulties in normalising opposition in the Irish Free State, this book analyses the collision of nineteenth-century monolithic nationalist movements with the norms and expectations of multiparty parliamentary democracy. The Irish revolutionaries’ attempts to create a Gaelic, postcolonial state involved resolving tension between these two ideas. Smaller, economically driven parties such as the Labour and Farmers’ Parties attempted to move on from the revolution’s unnatural focus on nationalist political issues, while the larger revolutionary parties descended from Sinn Féin attempt to recreate or restore notions of revolutionary unity. This conflict made democracy and opposition hard to establish in the Irish Free State.
This chapter sets out the historiographical context for the book. It analyses the ways in which previous scholars have emphasised Ireland’s relatively easy transition to democracy after the civil war ended, whether through analyses of factors that smoothed this transition or analyses of the democratic beliefs of key Irish politicians. The chapter also notes the fact that recent scholarly emphasis on the Irish civil war has obscured the challenges to democracy that continued after the civil war ended in 1923.
After the civil war ended in 1923, there were widespread expectations that Irish politics would return to a ‘normal’ left–right division and that the prominence of nationalist issues and the Sinn Féin Party would end. There were a number of smaller parties – the Farmers’ Party, the Labour Party, and the National League – that were organised around economic issues and were prepared to take power once politics returned to normal. The two large nationalist parties – the pro- and anti-Treaty wings of Sinn Féin – did not want this kind of normalisation, and continued to promote the need for a single national party and a style of politics that departed from British norms.
This chapter argues that the difficulties over the acceptance of open division began even before the Treaty was signed in 1921 and the civil war began in 1922. During the revolution, Sinn Féin leaders worked hard to prevent differences of opinion within the party from being expressed openly. Debates of the revolutionary Dáil were framed in such a way as to minimise oppositional voices and to present a united front against British imperialism. Deputies were then unprepared for an open debate over the Anglo-Irish Treaty when it was signed.
The creation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and its decision to enter the Dáil in 1927 are often seen as a massive change in Irish politics and the consolidation of Irish democracy. While having nearly all political opinion represented in the Dáil did matter, the normalisation of opposition did not take place in 1927. The smaller parties saw their dreams of forming a government fail in the summer of 1927, and the two large nationalist parties continued to stump for the recreation of a single national party that would dominate politics. Fianna Fáil also co-opted many of the issues that had animated the smaller parties and left them less room to operate ideologically.
Chapter 3 explores how taming the Rhine as an internal European highway translated into the creation of the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Diplomats at Vienna wished to restore a pre-Napoleonic social order, but they also felt the pull of Enlightenment confidence in civilized European society’s ability to control the Rhine and reform centuries of irrational river politics to secure free trade and economic benefits for all European states. To placate the impulse for both reform and restoration, European diplomats struck an awkward compromise between three existing legal interpretations of the transboundary river: the river as the private property of individual sovereigns; the river as shared commons between states; and the river as international commons open to all. While subsequent narratives suggest the third interpretation won out at the Congress of Vienna, an examination of the contingent politics of the Congress shows that the 1815 Rhine Commission was largely a return to pre-Napoleonic interpretations of the river as private property – but with a liberal twist that reflected imaginaries of the Rhine as a trans-European highway. By establishing the Rhine Commission, the Congress of Vienna affirmed freedom of commerce and created a consultative body to implement rational and sensible regulations to maintain the river as an efficient economic highway.
The Danube as a connecting river represented the flow of European power and civilization outward to command the eastern periphery, but the river as conduit can flow both ways, and in the 1850s, instability at the far reaches of the Danube delta threatened to destabilize European politics. Chapter 5 examines the Paris Peace Conference to end the Crimean War and the creation of the European Commission of the Danube to ensure a civilized and rational authority to control the mouth of the river. At Paris, competing interpretations of the transboundary river as private property versus international commons again took the diplomatic stage, but imaginaries of the Danube delta as an untamed space at the fringe of European civilization moved diplomats, particularly the French and British, to reject the Rhine Commission model as too weak a body to control this untamed geography. Instead, diplomats at Paris created a strong commission with independent authority not only to conduct engineering works to clear shipping channels, but with the policing and judiciary powers to maintain order and the fiscal powers to borrow money on the international market. By the 1930s, the Commission had become such an extraordinary international actor that historian Glen Blackburn even described it as being ‘at the twilight of statehood’.
If the Rhine and Danube commissions could be considered accomplishments in global governance, then the abortive International Commission of the Congo proposed in the text of the 1885 General Acts of the Berlin Conference was an international disaster. Chapter 7 examines diplomatic efforts to bring European normative and institutional models to the conceptual emptiness of the Congo basin. At first glance, it seemed that diplomats at Berlin faced the same dilemma as their predecessors at Paris in 1856 – whether to tame the river through private sovereign control or as international commons. However, the Congo represented a particular colonial geography in the European imagination – first, as a blank canvas waiting to be filled with European models, and second, in the Congo’s primary importance as a token in European balance of power politics. Combined, these framings led to the imposition of ill-fitting models taken from Europe’s own historical development onto the morally and politically ‘empty’ spaces of the colonial periphery. Hence, European diplomats’ inability to transform the Congo into a peaceful, non-sovereign, and neutral space for the benefit of international commerce reflected failings in the Western European geographical imaginary – both of the conceptually empty Congo as well as its understanding of Europe as a geography of universal and generalizable political possibilities.