After the revolution

Nationalist revolutionaries often find themselves in strange company. Nation-alist movements are usually coalitions of radically divergent social classes and political opinions glued together for as long as "the Struggle" continues. When that struggle faces its end point, be that defeat, victory or (more usually) compromise, the glue cracks and things fall apart.
What is remarkable about the Provisional Republican movement is that it has remained relatively united over the past two decades, while its leadership has dragged it from terrorist pariahs to power sharing with unionists, with the blessing of Tony Blair. Since the IRA given its P45 by its own leadership on July 27, what will Irish republicans do with the exclusively democratic means that they tell us they now embrace? Are they still committed to a 32-county socialist republic? Or are they going to continue to steal the clothes of their main electoral rival in Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic and Labour Party? Will they become the North's answer to Fianna Fail, the natural party of government that evolved from the losing side in the Irish Civil War of 1922-23? Sean Lemass, an IRA leader from 1916 who became Irish Taoiseach in the 1960s, once described his Fianna Fail as "a slightly constitutional party". Is that the future for Sinn Fein?
In Sinn Fein and the SDLP, British historians Gerard Murray and Jonathan Tonge trace the evolution of Sinn Fein and the IRA's ideas as to what their Republic might look like. Taking a long view of Northern Irish nationalist politics, and maintaining a factual rather than sectarian stance, the authors concentrate on the political wing of the movement. Their narrative starts in the 1960s, when the old nationalist tactic of abstensionism was abandoned in favour of the street politics of the civil rights movement and its political expression, the constitutional nationalism of the SDLP.
Republicanism split into Officials and Provisionals, and concentrated its energies into "armed struggle". Murray and Tonge quote the Provo weekly, Republican News, acknowledging "the political impotence and subordinate position of Sinn Fein" to the IRA in 1971. The article continued: "Here in Belfast, Sinn Fein appears to be its own worst enemy. Instead of being seen as an efficient and effective machine providing the political leadership, it seems content to sit and bask in the reflected glory of the military wing of the movement."
In the 1970s there was little discussion of social policy. The shift in strategy occurred as the older leadership based in the South was elbowed aside by the younger generation from the North in the 1980s. Most were teenagers during the mayhem of the late 1960s, who saw (and see) their primary function as defenders of their community. These were harder men, but ultimately more pragmatic. Gerry Adams may have blood ancestors among earlier generations of rebels, but most, such as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, had no such family history. It becomes clear from the narrative that what made them angry and ruthless in the 1970s also made them amenable to compromise in the 1990s. If that means ensuring that their voice is best heard in the corridors of Stormont and (eventually) Westminster, so be it.
Murray and Tonge chart the political rise of Sinn Fein at the expense of the SDLP. The roots of Sinn Fein's policy to overtake the SDLP as the chief political representatives for the northern minority community can be traced back to the early 1980s. The risk that John Hume, SDLP leader, took to talk with Gerry Adams and bring the Provos in from the cold may have paid dividends to society in the form of the peace process and to Hume personally in the shape of the Nobel peace prize. But it weakened the SDLP.
One problem the SDLP faced, write Murray and Tonge, was that although the Good Friday Agreement could be viewed as predominantly an SDLP accord, the nationalist electorate did not see the party as the most appropriate defender of its interests in the new political dispensation. Sinn Fein was seen as the party more likely to ensure full implementation of the Agreement.
The growing dominance of Sinn Fein is a theme of both this book and French historian Agnes Maillot's New Sinn Fein. Both argue that Sinn Fein has good political strategists and committed political workers but lacks smart policy works. As Murray and Tonge say: "The SDLP looked increasingly old and middle class, lacking radical zeal." The consequence of this, and a similar process among the unionist parties, is the dominance of the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein in recent elections.But the authors argue that Sinn Fein has moved towards a civic republicanism and away from an "ethnic republicanism", which assumed a homogeneity of identity across the island. It is Maillot who points out Sinn Fein's quandary: "Republicans see it as fundamental that they succeed in remaining as true to their radical roots as possible while not confining themselves to the margins." The crucial indicator, she adds, will be next year's elections in the Irish Republic, which will reveal whether Sinn Fein's support has reached its limit.
Their main electoral problem has been the elephant in its corner: as long as the IRA was around - robbing banks and trying to cover up the murder of Belfast Catholic Robert McCartney - republicans appeared hypocritical, says Maillot. "It is considered impossible to reconcile a peace strategy with continued military activities. Republicans are seen as living in a culture that is complacent towards paramilitary operations."
But breaking away into unarmed politics has its opponents. For republican ultras, the dominance of the electoral process ignores the opportunities of "vanguardism". As Murray and Tonge say, "Sinn Fein's election victory of 1918 was preceded by armed rebellion, which came to be supported by armed rebellion." The IRA had served its purpose for the republican mainstream, however, "removing the sectarian essence of the northern state, helping nationalists become part of an "Ireland of Equals", even if that Ireland remained partitioned.
This, then, is the significance of the IRA pledge to lay down its arms last month: "All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means... There is a responsibility on society to ensure that there is no reoccurrence of the pogroms of 1969 and the early 1970s. There is also a universal responsibility to tackle sectarianism in all its forms."
This move is a perfect example of what the Scottish academic Tom Nairn once called the "modern Janus": the ability and necessity of nationalist movements to face backwards towards an idealised historical justification of its actions, while facing forward to a happy end - in this case an "Ireland of Equals".And yet there is a bigger picture. There was always more to the IRA and the peace process than the back streets of Belfast and the "dreary steeples of Tyrone and Fermanagh".
In Reds and the Green, Emmet O'Connor tells how, 80 years ago, the fledgling Soviet Union tried to co-opt the IRA into its goals of world revolution. O'Connor's trawl through the Moscow archives of the Comintern has unearthed documents that speak from the past of hopeless idealism, wasted journeys and ruined dreams. The enterprise reeked also of rancid cynicism.
The Bolsheviks supported the IRA during its war against the British in 1919-21. Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik revolutionary, told the 1919 party congress that the IRA "is only water for our mill, since it contributes to the destruction of English imperialism".
O'Connor tells how Eamon de Valera, Irish leader and the epitome of Catholic nationalism, "dispatched an emissary to Moscow to secure recognition and weapons". During the Irish Civil War, the anti-treaty IRA tried to buy £10,000 of weapons from the Soviets via the Irish Communist Party. Some tried to adapt a "social programme" authored by Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern agent.
Geopolitics has also intervened in the integrity of Northern Ireland's quarrel more recently - and with more success. It was supreme bad timing for three republicans to have been caught in Colombia in 2001 training with FARC, a group denounced by the White House as narco-terrorists. And then, one month later, al-Qaeda brought the practice of terrorism to previously unfathomable depths, killing in one New York morning almost twice the number of people murdered by the IRA over nearly 30 years. Years of lobbying in Washington were wasted.
Sinn Fein needed to regain US confidence, writes Maillot. The result was the IRA's statement on October 23 2001, its first verifiable act of putting weapons beyond use. Martin McGuinness was in Washington DC that day. "This was hardly a coincidence", Maillot adds, "but rather, probably, a confidence-building measure on the part of republicans to try to regain lost ground."
It is probably even less of a coincidence that, after months of foot-dragging, the IRA's hoped-for final communiqué emerged after the July bombs in London, and days after Tony Blair's remarkable comment that "IRA political demands or their previous atrocities could not be directly compared to fundamentalists who carried out the 9/11 US attacks."
Which brings us to another controversial viewpoint, dismissively described by Murray and Tonge as the "external events thesis". This argues that the end of the cold war helped to spur the shift in republicanism and helped to shape the Good Friday Agreement. This thesis, originally outlined by Mick Cox, is fully described and the row neatly outlined by Adrian Guelke in the liveliest and wittiest chapter
of an otherwise academic volume of essays, Renovation or Revolution? New Territorial Politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UCD Press). Cox claimed that there was only a "partial commitment" from the IRA towards Stalinist socialism, and that the first steps towards the Good Friday Agreement were under way in the mid-80s.
However, Cox said something different: that the end of the cold war and the "collapse of the wider revolutionary project" altered the global context of the struggles. It made it harder for the IRA to justify its strategy campaign, which by the late 1980s had reached a dead end anyway. This idea was surprisingly controversial when Cox first voiced it in 1997, annoying nationalist-minded academics because it refuted the view that the roots of the problems and solutions for Ireland could all be found within. "Prior to 1968", writes Guelke, "there was a predominance of literature that blamed either British imperialism or the Republic of Ireland's irredentism for the conflict. However, by the 1980s there was wide consensus among academic analysis that communal antagonism inside Northern Ireland was the root of the problem. Perhaps one reason why the Cox thesis attracted so much criticism was that it was seen as a challenge to that consensus.
Reds and the Green shows that the IRA of four generations ago was prepared to travel a long way, politically and geographically, for succour and support. The past two decades have shown that republicans have prospered by recognising the reality of a tiny province of six counties. The events of recent months have shown that even the most fervent of revolutionary nationalists cannot avoid the facts of globalisation. And that in the war on terror, which concentrates most, minds these days; Gerry Adams is getting in step with Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
By John O'Farrell
John O'Farrell is a journalist based in Belfast.
source - http://news.ft.com/cms/s/54354ca8-0956-11da-880b-00000e2511c8.html