Seamus Deane
Marxism and Nationalism and a few subsequent remarks on the Northern Irish crisis.
I feel it very appropriate that I should be making these remarks and that we should be talking about these issues in Maynooth, one of the institutions which was founded if you like, to ensure the appearance and permanence of sectarianism in Irish political life, that and the Orange Order both dating from 1795, both of whom institutions were part of the British intervention to prevent the enlightenment project of the United Irishmen in the eighteenth century. I think it's worth stressing that sectarianism is not a sort of pathology from which the Northern Irish are particularly prone to suffer. It's not just a pathology which has to do with certain accidental features of Irish History since the reformation. It is part of a longstanding policy which is part and parcel of the act of union, and it is part of the way in which Northern ireland has remained part and parcel of the Act of Union. Sectarianism is structural, it s not a pathology or pathological. It is necessary for the perpetuation of the Northern Irish state in its present form.
This to some extent - g- brings us to one one of the questions which has constantly exercised those on the left both in Britain and in Ireland, but more I think in Britain when we look at the Irish question, because the Irish question whether it's north or south, particularly relevant to the southern state of the twenties and thirties.The Irish question is always seen to be not just one of national identity and the political forms and institutions which could encapsulate or articulate that, it is also seen to be a question which is inevitably and indissolubly bound up with some kind of atavism, some kind of irrationality, some deep irrationality or atavism of which sectarianism is one of the expressions, of which traditional religous belief and various forms of clerical domination, whether it be Protestant in the north or Catholic in the south, seem to me again not accidental but structural features.
Is it the case then that when Irish nationalism - of whatever form - , the Unionist form of Irish or British nationalism, the Catholic form of Irish nationalism which speaks of liberation for the so called 32 counties, is it inevitable that any leftward regard for each or both of those will always find in them some irrational feature which says to them: this is a form of nationalism which unlike many European, many African and many postcolonial nationalisms, I suppose the most articulate of which by now is the Indian nationalism of the great sub-continent, is this a form of nationalism which unlike them, is given to that form of atavism which makes it not only unanalysable but which makes it necessary in order to analyse the situation at all, to repudiate that to its core, to repudiate it from the outset as an agency or a set of agencies which must be removed from the equation so that the situation can in some way be resolved or even understood.
I think that in some the insights of some of the Indian critical theorists, I am thinking here of someone like Chaturgee, when they make the distinction which they say is inherent, an inescapable distinction which comes about in colonised cities between, between what they call the public life and the private life. When they say that in these societies that have been colonised, there is a degree to which, certains kinds of tradition and especially traditions which are regarded by the colonising power as non-rational, non-moral or anti/non progressive, when those types of tradition are maintained, cherished and nourished within an idea of the Indian family or the idea of the Irish family or any other colonised community's notion of the family, Chaturgee says, in effect what that colonised society is attempting to do is actually to say that there is a boundary to colonial invasion, there is a boundary to that kind of imperial penetration which will be maintained even at the cost of retaining belief in things which the retainers recognise to be, from the western point of view or from the modernising point of view as anti/non-progressive or considered irrational or non-rational.
This, I think, is one of the problems which has always afflicted all left-wing analyses of the Irish situation. It is of course standard to say that nationalism can be viewed in a continuum, it can be recognised as an emancipatory movement in many respects, it can be recognised as an incarcerating movement in many other respects, and both those respects have been visible north and south in the last 70-80 years of the so called Irish question. But the problem is, is that kind of, let's take the readiest example the one that I began with, Catholicism, its association with Irish nationalism, its rhetorical and anti-progressive and in many ways profoundly worsened toward matters of private moral judgement like for instance sexuality, that in particular and the way that this has exploded in the church's face in the last ten years or so, maybe even more recently, more powerfully in the last five years when we say there is a relationship in Ireland that has been blind and a damaging relationship between the ir retention, which remeber is the one of long historical grounding, the retention of a specific form of Irish familial life. Irish , the lifeblod of the Irish commmunity, the life that in some way endured colonial oppression, the life that endured various forms of state intervention, the life that endured various forms of derision and what that is in some way connected to, you know we are told, "the deepest and most traditional beliefs" of the people, you get this in Irish discourse from various sides of the political spectrum you get it from Yeats , the Anglo Irish from the Catholics and Catholic Church. But most of all you get it after the Catholic Church after the at least partial triumph of 1922, so there is a specific form of Irish Catholic traditonal life which is attached to the new idea of the state, and the state and that traditional life are, we are told, made coincident even though that coincidence is one that is sustained only by various forms of coercion. Silent coercion in some case, [ ] coercion in almost all cases. Anyone looking from a left-wing point of view at such a nationalism and at such a coercive achievment would say: there in a sense we have a charcteristic example of a European nationalism which turned right, turned towards a kind of a introversion of which of course there were much more frightening examples in Europe, especially in France and Germany prior to, after, and during the second war, but that kind of inversion almost reveals what is at the heart of nationalism in its finest moment, that biological imperium that nationalism can become and that it did become say in Nazi Germany.Against that where is the emancipatory, where is the liberatory movement of Irish nationalism or whateverver liberating movement which comes with the defeat of Irish nationalism as for instance in the Northern State. Where according to the analysis of the what we call the Stickies - the Offical IRA- produced, I'm thinking of the Roy Johnson version of his analysis in the 1960s it was right and proper now for the IRA and the Republican movement in general to begin to support accepting the state, to support the idea of the connection with Britain because given the post-war record of legislation on the British socialist government, the Attlee government, which indeed had introduced free education and the welfare state and all of that, given that it was only by support of this state that any kind of liberal modernity (I heard this phrase pronounced in a damp basement in 29 Mountjoy Squre during those years) would be produced for Ireland that would release it , would emancipate it from that clerical oppression and obfuscation and obscurantism which was not only charcteristic of the south, but was also charcteristic of a south which was sunk in a kind of economic nationalism and economic deliquescence. So a link was established by the , of course they weren't the first to do it, but they were the first to do it who were politically powerful at least within the republican movement, of which I have some knowledge, they made this link between economic delinquency, a kind of pathological nationalism and the need for the introduction of Ireland to modernity which could only be achieved via the British state and despite the clerical aspect of unionism which were of course widespread and continue to be to this very day.
So there in a sense, we begin to see what in some ways those members of the British left who did pay any attention to Ireland at that time tended to take, Paul Wilson and Kevin MacNamara, who actually were in some ways the progenitors of, and the early voices crying in the wilderness especially during the 1950s, the progenitors of the civil rights movement in the North, but the essential British intellectual left-wing notion of Irish nationalism was in some ways, fed into and fed by, that offical IRA version that emerged iin the 1960s and lasted until the fall of Stalinism
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in fact are terms that deny the real analysis that they have not yet received, and I think that type of analysis is necessary to understand both unionist and nationalist and republican positioons. And I will just say as an aside, I am insistent on making a distinction between nationalist and republican, because a republican position is one which can consume and assume certain aspects of nationalism but is not in any way consumed by it.
But the question that I want to ask is , what is it that we mean when we say that modernity, or modernisation or liberal modernity is something that can be introduced or that was introduced or that the introduction of which is intended to form a certain kind of state relationship? I mean for most peopple I think modernity means one, secularism, or a degree of secularism in this society; that is the taking away from any clerical or institutional clerical guidance within a society the forms of power which once had been theirs. The second thing, I suppose must be economic development but of course here come and especially for the left-wing to a really almost incoherent moment in our attitude towards this. We can go back to stereotype for a moment, it used to be said, certainly after the second war and from the second war until the late seventies, that the superior economic development of the north in relationship to the south was itself founded or to some extent attributable not just to the British connection but to the British connection in that deeper and larger reservoir image of you know Protestantism and the work ethic associated with that, whereas the economic retardation of the south was not only related to the fact that it had cut itself off from the greates post-imperial power but it was also associated with that slothful and feckless habit of work or non-work that is asccociated with or was once associated with catholicism. Of course circumstances have changed so much by now that neither of these sterotypes is nearly as effective as it once had been only still
but if the south really has finally managed to join the global market and the help of EU funds has restructured itself to a cosiderable, and some people would even say to an astonishing degree, and it has done that to such an extent that the south, or the Republic could now said to be a more successful economic entity than the north, though of course the North has always pointed out it's not an economic entity, it is part of the UK, and therefore has to be understood in that relation, but even so with the disruption of that stereotype, with the emergence of the "Celtic Tiger" so-called, what have we got now? We have global capitalism absorbing the south or the south absorbing itself into global capitalism and this we are to understand is a great advance, the south is not a
common to that which the north once made and through this and the connection with th the EU through all that large step and those sub-steps of economic interdependency which charcterise the modern economic world, we are told that this is one of the ways in which Ireland will in effect finally join the international community and
borders which is all very . Now that is a very curious thing for the left to greet solutions or the so called solution to a political problem by saying that is a problem which has been solved by global capitalism and that the triumph of global capitalism in a particular island that have been aching of course to join in that in some way
more people than the terms which had ever been offered by the imperial connection with England. On the other hand if we don't think of modernism or modernity or modernisation, these are all slippery words and concepts of course, but if you don't think of them as necessarily having to do with GDP and GNP if you don't think of them as you know a form of a brilliantly sophisticated form of what we were just hearing about a moment ago, constructive unionism, if you don't think in other words that economic dvelopment is the way to, or a satisfactory way of solving a political problem like that which besets us, has beset us on this island for all of this century. Then the problem for most people is in what sense can modernity be defined so it is not understood only as a form of political economy, is political economy really the only science, the only discipline in terms of which these very complex problems can be solved or resolved?
And of course, I'm not going to in any way detail these now, we have to remember that modernity as it was understand for at least half of this century, modernity has been understood by most intellectuals right and left wing as a form of catastrophe, as a catastrophe which of course, and this again is where a kind of relation exposes itself, it is a catastrophe in which some kind connection which was historiacal, some kind of connection with that which was traditional, some kind of connection with that which was specific to a culture, community and even if one dares to use the word, specific to a race. In which in some sense that was lost, was broken, was disrupted, and that as a consequence we have with modernity, and with economic success and the conversion of the citizen into the consumer, with that we have the most profound form of alienation that has ever been known, a form of alienation that Marx did anticipate but probably going further than he even dreamed of, and therefore in some ways there is a connection indeed between modernity as a catastrophe and modernisation as a success story; the two things are interconnected both north and south of the border in this island and of course they are also connected in the neibhouring island and all through the European continent, certainly that part which belongs to the EU. The contrast of course if one tries to mount a critique of modernity/modernistaion in this way, the contrast that one is always offered is if you don't like that then you know the danger is that you will slip into a nostalgic form of traditionalism which will itself lead back into all of those atavistic acreages that always lie and form the hinterland of any kind of attempt to identify a community in the terms which are called national terms.
All right, so let me try to abbreviate this a little further, if the battle is or at least one breast of the battle is between that which is atavistic and and that which is moral... if modernity and the British connection, and atavism and the Irish connection which were once almost stable terms in the dispute have now been dissolved and broken by the changing circumstances of especially the last thirty years of low scale war in northern ireland and economic development in the republic, then how can we now both begin to interpet and analyse our position, and most of all how can we interpret the northern situation. This is a big problem of course for the incoming labour government but again, who could be optimistic, who in Ireland, who from northern ireland, who especially from the minority in Northern Ireland could be optimistic about the arrival of a labour government, given its record in the 70s when it was last in power, given Harold Wilson's collapse in front UWC strike, given the Mervyn Rees policy of criminalisation which led to the hunger strikes, given Roy Mason's introduction of the SAS which led to death squads, the bombing of Dublin and Monaghan and other atrocities, most of which of course will not be released to public view for another 50 or 60 years if at all. But the reason one should be suspicous of a labour government actually has to with precisely the kind of things which I've been speaking of, because why was labour so given to such atrociously coercive policies when it was in power in the north, why did it quiver in front of unionist intransigence, because labour was of course was afraid and always has been afraid, and the english left has always been afraid of English nationalism and especially that form of english nationism which is embodied and embedded in the Tory party, and which has been embodied and embedded also of course in some sections of the Labour party. And David was making the point in the first lecture that it is very difficult, and has traditionally been diffficult, this is true in England, it is true in France and I think it's true at the moment in a much coarser way of the United States. It is very difficult for an imperial power to recognise itself as being really, simply a highly successful form of nationalism, nationalism which thinks of itself as so successful that it deserves to re-duplicate itself all over the globe as fast as possible and hope that people will be grateful for that reduplication and especially with reference to the people within it. The kind of nationalism that we see shared if you like between the Labour and Tory party has some analogies to the kind of American nationalism shared between the republican and the democratic parties and the same sort of thing seems to purtain. In each case that it's the party that is secure in its nationalism, the party that is secure in the belief that it is the possesor and the guardian of the national spirit, that is the party of course that can act in a surgical manner in relation to peripheral problems like for instance Ireland, or in the US case like for instance China , there is a problem within labour and especially within the labour party but I think within all left-wing parties in Britain that they cannot recognise that English nationalism actually moves in the same spectrum as does Irish nationalism, that it moves in that spectrum from various forms of atavism to various forms of triumphant modernity and modernisation and that it recognises, and of course this recognition is going to be reinforced the more established we get I think in future years in Britain by the Scottish Parliament and maybe the Welsh Parliament as well as an Irish one, that the relationship between modernity and atavism, - these are not the happiest terms but they're the only terms in fact available at the moment- the relationship between these is not a relationship of opposition, it's a relationship of intimacy, and that intimacy is like the relationship between development and under-development; it's like the relationship betwen tradition and modernity; it's like the relationship between superstructure and sub-structure; it's like a whole series of relationships which depend on their dichotomous power on precisely the fact that they are inter-related , not seperated, and that this is a political situation, a political problem which for instance is perfectly visible now in Northern Irish Unionism perfectly visible in Drumcree
the atavism of Drumcree: to claim this is our tradition, this is our culture, and I'm afraid that at any rate that's true, that is their tradition, that is their culture to march where they want, to go wherever they like to, and at the same time recognising that there is another aspect to Unionist tradition which always prides itself on being free of such atavisms on not being contaminated by them, on being protestant, British, hardworking, industrial and modern. The two things are not as I say, opposites, the two things are so inter-related that one can only be understood by watching the proces by which it becomes very often at certain conjunctures the other and this happens so frequently, say in the last roughly thirty years of strife in `Northern Ireland.
This has happened so frequently on both sides as for instance and I'll give you an example from the IRA side, that the recipe the Offical IRA recipe that emerged from the Roy Johnson group in the 1960s, look at the way that was touted especially right up to their dispute -the war between the two wings of the IRA- how that was referred to as, and in some circles still is referred to as - a modernist analysis of an old problem, just as the provisional IRA were emerging and the Provisional IRA was then characterised as the atavistic dark side of the Stickies, of the officals, the Provisionals were everything that everybody had ever dreamt about militant republicanism because here was a blind irrational force emerging to deny the power of the economic analysis and of course, this is where republicanism is often criticised because of the poverty of its economic critique of the Irish situation. Yet by now having looked at that contrast between one modern and the other atavistic the position is now almost reversed; the Provisional IRA has now transmuted in its political form into Sinn Fein, it is as decently left-wing as one could wish in many respects, whereas the offical IRA are as profoundly stalinist as those if there is a party left anymore in Europe and so they now are almost atavistic in relation to the decent and tired up version of SF (that once was the provisional IRA that once was the atavistic counterpart to the Stickies). What I'm trying to point out here is that a certain process, a process of mutation from one to the other can take place in certain conditions, and it's very difficult not only to control those conditions but to find a ground for understanding what is happening, if in fact one's powers of conceptualisation are limited and restrained by those kinds of contrasts and dichotomies which I've just been speaking of.
Now of course I could say, though I don't know how I'd emerge in saying it, what I could say is that tharefore what one should do is to abandon such dichotomies, to forego that notion of nationalism, to forego that notion of modernity, to forego that notion of atavism, to find some other way of comprehending not only the Northern Irish situation but the whole problem of global capitalism and its relationship with so-called traditional societies. As I say, I don't know anywhere, anywhere in the world where this is effectively being done , except in the sub-continent of India by the Indian theorists. And perhaps it's from them that we'll finally be able to emerge with a somewhat more sophisticated and less limiting series of dichotomies than those that at the moment oppress us.
But I will finish by saying this; given that that is part of the situation that we have inherited, of course it is equally possible when we speak of modernity, to say that these are terms which like materialism and colonialism - here I'm taking the very simple line of view that imperialism is colonialism that has been bureaucratised that has been made systematic, it's much less ramshackle than colonialism, it's much less obviously rapacious than colonialism but nevertheless the two things are of course interconnected if not necessarily in an evolutionary way. But that imperialism, colonialism and nationalism have a terrible complicity one with the other, and that complicity always emerges in those arguments which say, for instance the Irish arguments, the revisionist arguments which I think really were begun, as has been said elsewhere, by of all people Sean O'Faolain in the 1930s. The revisionist arguments that says if you have a decayed society like this, a so-called decayed society 19th century Ireland and along comes a brilliantly energetic society like the then social and political system of England, that the invasion of the dying one by the vibrant one is in fact not only a catalytor for improvement, development and modernisation that would otherwise not have taken place, but that in effect this is something to be welcomed, greeted and to be thankful for, it is something that although it involves a degree of loss nevertheless the gain will always be greater than the loss. Now there again, within that notion of the colonisation of a particular space by a particular power, there is always implicit within that the notion that that space was filled more abundantly and more brilliantly than it otherwise would haver been without that invasion. Therefore finally within the Irish situation it is almost impossible to find a very large number of people, who would agree that whatever model of colonialism that you offer, especially if you offer that benign model of colonialism as the energising power for an otherwise decaying or decadent traditional society, there is still a great difficulty to find any large consensus that Ireland ever was in a proper sense a colony, that it was ever colonised say in the sense that Egypt was, or India was or large tracts of the African continent, because colonisation of course brings all forms of, shadows of atroticy, shadows of disgrace, shadows of calamity, shadows of various forms of brutal rapacity to which Ireland cannot quite belong in the same as the others did because of course Ireland was constitutionally attached to England, and the other two countries Scotland and Wales, in more elaborate ways than were any of the more distant colonies.Therfore it's constitutionally difficult to agree to the colonising argument even though in economic reality it is impossible not to agree that the colonising argument has two persuasive moments, one that it did stimulate Irish economic life and in another way that it did destroy Irish economic life; it did both because it was both rapacious and it was energetic. Yet when one looks at it again it comes down to the same problem, of course, was colonialism a modernising benefical energy or was it a catastrophe for the island; if it was a catastrophe for the island, are those who regarded it as a catastrophe, those who are going back to a defence of traditional specifities, traditional custom and traditional ways of feeling, precisely because that's all they have left, all they have to preserve after that immense modernising catastrophe has passed over them and in doing so, even consciously, are they going to defend something which is material to them: non-modern, regressive, anti-modern and in some ways, in the benign term, traditional and peculiar and specific. And that's the argument that of course in post colonial theory is being elaborated in a number of different directions.
And there we stop, just finally to review that therefore it is almost impossible I think, given, and even if you take, just as an example of all of this . It is almost impossible for a left wing view, British or Irish, of Ireland to excavate, in any comprehend the complexity of the situation, largely because those views are dominated by an attitude towards nationalism which sees it in these dichotomous and those dichotomous ways, although they are very poweful and have become traditional, are actually in the end I think sadly impoverishing.
