Inclusive Church
Dr Rachel Buxton, who teaches English Literature at New College, Oxford, and who has written a fine DPhil on the influence of Robert Frost on modern Irish poets, has alerted me to this petition in favour of an inclusive Anglican Church. God would not appreciate any support from me, I fear, but you might like to ally yourselves with the angels.

Bob Armstrong
There was a very interesting and well-researched article on 'The Origins of Trotskyism in Ireland', written by Ciaran Crossey and James Monaghan, in Vol. 6, no 2 / 3 (Summer 1996) of Revolutionary History. Re-reading it, I find that the Militant / Socialist Party position on the Irish 'national question', which I have elsewhere characterised as a distortion of classical Trotskyist theory (scroll down to the entry for 26 August 2003), is in fact rather venerable.

Bob armstrong wrote a 'perspectives document' for the Irish Trotskyists in 1945 which argued that:

"Irish bourgeois nationalism had already exhausted its mission as a vehicle for the development of the productive forces before any real development took place. International Socialism alone can ensure a fresh upswing in production for Ireland; and it is precisely for this reason that the one uncompleted task of the bourgeois revolution, national unification, can only be achieved by the proletarian revolution." (p 38.)

Crossey & Monaghan praise this as 'correct'. I would argue that the productive forces of Ireland had a lot of potential yet. Since then we have had the industrial revolution of the 1960s and the Celtic Tiger of the 1980s / 1990s. The medium term forecasts remain good.

Moreover, this is economism. Why were catholic workers in Northern Ireland not be absorbed into the United Kingdom during the post-war upswing if development of the productive forces is all that one need take into consideration. It is neccessary, for Armstrong to be correct, to prove at a minimum that unionism was an epi-phenomenon imposed upon an underlying Irish nationhood.

Lastly, was 're-unification' the only task of the 'bourgeois revolution' left uncompleted? Arguably the dissolution of autarchic and revanchist nationalism, and the clipping of Roman Catholic power, might be considered to be uncompleted priorities in such a category (though I hesitate to accept its validity).

Another interesting quote from Armstrong's article is:

"In short, by making a public display of samples of the British 'democracy' being daily meted out to hundreds of Ulster citizens, a Civil Liberties Council has a revolutionary role to perform. It can hasten the downfall of the regime. It can set on fire the conscience of the whole community, shaming and shocking even the Protestant petit-bourgeoisie into protest. The fight for civil liberties is an integral and immensely important aspect of the class struggle."

This, in some ways, prefigures the quasi-revolutionary role of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Is there something about the Trotskyist movement that makes its tactics, if not strategy or analysis, particularly effective at certain points in Northern Ireland's history? Its notable that the 1960s saw Michael Farrell, Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin - all Trotskyist or Marxisant - raise to remarkable prominence. Mid-Ulster, hardly the most likely of places, was the only electoral constituency to see a representative of the New Left elected anywhere in Europe in the tumultuous year of 1968.

(These will do as my Curious Quote #7)

Pics
I have posted some new photographs here.

Curious Quote #6
I'm still in Belfast an unable to blog much.

Here is something I cam across in Cahir Healy's The Mutilation of a Nation (1945), an anti-partition polemic. He quote's a report produced by the Protestant Young Men's Association, after they surveyed a 'young boys camp' (penal?) at Ballymoyer in June-July 1940:

"The Catholic boy has a passionate faith in the future of a free Ireland. ... We cannmot refrain from expressing our concern at the similiarity between the spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical state of the unemployed youth of this province to that which obtained in Germany at the rise of the National Socialist Party. ... In short, we are on the brink of a revolutionary situation. ... With the instrument of propaganda now in the hands of the Government it is of the utmost importance that the refusal of many to employ Catholic boys should be discouraged. ... We neglect their problem at our peril."

Only Brief Today
I'm in Belfast today, grabbing some quick research. I'm reminded that the second-hand bookshops are much better here than in Oxford. At £4 an hour, the internet cafes are not.

Curious Quote #5:

"There are two things I'm not. I'm not a tout, and I'm not gay," Johnny Adair, UDA assasin, wishes not to be misunderstood.

Curious Quotes #4
The dynamic of revolution, according to Winston Churchill, in an essay on Leon Trotsky, " Alias Bronstein":

"He had raised the poor against the rich. He had raised the penniless against against the poor. He had raised the criminal against the penniless. ... In vain he turned his gaze upon the wild beasts."

From Great Contemporaries, 1937.

IDS Speech
Have a look at Chris Brooke's Virtual Stoa for an excellent close reading of Ian Duncan Smith's speech to Conservative Party Conference. Pertinent points are made most amusingly.

Victoria Lill and I watched highlights last night. So cringe-worthy was it that Vicky half hid behind her coat. Despite his coaching in hand gestures etc, IDS still has a strange lolling movement of the head when speaking. It makes him look uncommitted.

His jibe at Charles Kennedy was extraordinarily lumpen, and a bit rich coming from the party of Winston Churchill.

Siim's Website
Another of our ever industrious Princeton students, Siim Sikkut. has a blog here. Go and have a look. It's very interesting.

Siim hails from Estonia, so Irish bloggers might be particularly interested in perspectives from another small nation that experienced unhappy relations with a larger neighbour.

Siim was a little underwhelmed by Stonehenge. Indeed, I've always thought that Ireland's New Grange is more awesome, though quite as mysterious. This could be simply my national chauvinism, of course.

He also links to an interesting site on the United States' 100 most important historical documents. They do not seem to include NSC-68, [NSC for National Security Council], a 1950 position paper penned by Paul Nitze. This shifted from the Kennan doctrine - that the Soviets were agressive but not millenarian, and that the US should concentrate on containment in the European theatre - to the militant position that "A defeat anywhere is a defeat everywhere."

The document won widespread acceptance after the 'Great Leader' of baleful repute, Kim Il Sung, invaded South Korea. US military expenditure, until then facing cuts, was quadrupled.

This had a crucial role in putting the US on a permanent war-footing, arming it for global cold war and now neo-con interventionism. Immediately, it reversed the US's anti-imperialism, as it faced down leftish national liberation movements. It also helped create a space for McCarthyism and allowed the National Security state to grow apace.

National Poetry Day
Today is National Poetry Day. My first ever published writing was a poem: at the age of 8 in the Ballymena Guardian. George Friel, who worked in the forestry office with my dad, introduced me to a journo, but didn't tell me why. The hack snapped a photo of me looking dreamy, and this accompanied my school-prize winning effort in the next week's paper. It is now sadly lost to me, but I remember it was called Creation, and contained the imperishable lines " ... then God changed his mind / and the dinosaurs had to go."

Anyway, here is an extract from John Hewitt's The Coasters. I wanted to use it as a preamble to my book on Ulster Unionism in the 1960s, but Bob Purdie, in his excellent account of the civil rights movement, Politics in the Streets, got there first.

You coasted along.
And all the time, though you never noticed,
the old lies festered;
the ignorant became more thoroughly infected;
there were gains, of course;
you never saw any go barefoot.

The government permanent, sustained
By the regular plebiscites of loyalty ...
Faces changed on the posters, names too, often,
but the same families, the same class of people.
A Minister once called you by your first name.
You coasted along
and the sores suppurated and spread.

Now the fever is high and raging;
who would have guessed it, coasting along?
The ignorant-sick thresh about in delerium
and tear at the scabs with dirty finger-nails.
The cloud of infection hangs over the city,
a quick change of wind and it
might spill over the leafy suburbs.
You coasted too long.

This can count as my Curious Quote #3.

Tony Judt on
Tony Judt writes in this week's New York Review of Books (here) that:

"The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."

From this he argues that a modern, bi-national state would be the functional equivalent to our multi-cultural liberal democracies.

I think that there are all sorts of problems with this. As I've blogged before (Ethnic Myths versus Liberal Democracy?, scroll down), I think far too much is made of the difference between wicked ethnic nationalism and nice civic nationalism. All nationalisms are based on an imagined community, whether this be based on a constantly reiterated ideology ('the American dream') or an acculturating historical origin myth ('racy of the soil'). In practise, both elements tend to co-exist. Both forms can be malign - fascism, 'manifest destiny' or whatever - or benign. US nationalism is no less nationalism for being mostly benign in its current form.

All nationalisms posit an 'imagined community' of common ideals and origin that encourage people of the same country to identify with each other even if they have never met. Classes, which may well have opposed immediate material interests, can fumble a considerable level of co-operation, even based on limited (usually unequal) self-sacrifice in the 'national interest'. This sentiment is productive, depending on contingency, of all sorts of constitutions, from totalitarianism to liberal democracy.

The US is an immigrant country, the EU is accepting (with greater or lesser grace) an increasing number of immigrants. Does this represent post-nationalism? Well, it's far from the racialist fantasies of various nationalist ideologues, but in fact the mechanisms are similar to classical nation-making. Immigrants buy into a new national myth, at the inevitable cost of abandoning previous identities. Immigrants to the US identify with the myth of America as home of the vigorous, discarding the decadence in the Old World, relying on rugged individualism. Each generation outdoes the last through cumulative self-betterment under-pinned by liberty. (The only possible 'out-group' in all of this is African-American. They, of course, cannot readily adopt the self-image of pioneering voluntary immigrants, one of wave upon wave of 'pilgram fathers').

It's more tricky in Europe, where there is a greater importance given to the notion of individual embeddedness in the nation through ancestral lineage. Historically, immigrants have married into 'native' families, thus acquiring psychological citizenship. Despite multi-culturalism, this is unlikely to stop. Europe is adopting a weaker form of 'ideological nationalism', but I think this really only permits toleration for immigrant ‘guests of the nation'. It might require inter-marriage to fully absorb the latest waves of immigrants. In the mean time, immigrants after the first generation tend to adopt the norms and culture of wider society quite quickly, which serves much the same purpose.

The point is immigrant groups must be absorbed if they are to be integrated. If they retain an oppositional stance to the host culture, they will either be dysfunctional or they will develop a counter-nationalism. Genuine multi-culturalism, where ethnic cultures are maintained rigidly, is destabilising and ends either in chronic disaffection (the 'race' question in the US perhaps, Northern Ireland certainly), or in the emergence of new nation-states.

Of course the 'host' national culture is not static. The absorption process is rendered easier by the dialectic of native / settler. But we should not kid ourselves that it is a balanced process. Through weight of numbers and domination of the apparatus of state and cultural diffusion, the 'native' ideology sets the parameters.

So I think Judt's view of view of post-nationalist, cosmopolitan America / Europe is naive.

More crudely, how did we get from the "late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law"? Well, two world wars, massive ethnic cleansing (particularly of Germans from 1944) and the elimination of stranded sub-national enclaves. Where this didn't happen (Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia), all our 'advanced' ideas on citizenship were impotent in rooting out ethnic hostilities.

For the chattering classes, like the pre-modern aristocracies, cosmopolitanism is perhaps natural. They flit from place to place on jets, they speak with other members of the elite in a lingua franca, they subscribe to liberal internationalism the way their forebears subscribed to Christian internationalism. For the rest, nationalism is a comfort, bringing a sense of community and pride. It need not be intrusive. The American's call it Patriotism. It is not the last refuge of the scoundrel, but a pleasing texture to life. It is why we pay attention to the political institutions of our democracies.

The Jewish state of Israel is a nation, like the US, like France, like Ireland. It rests on a common myth, it binds individuals of multifarious identity, it could conceivably absorb immigrants even of non-Jewish background (it would not be impossible to universalise aspects of the Israeli national myth). But unrestricted immigration of Arabs would certainly destroy the idea of the Jewish nation. Arabs, understandably, will not buy into the Israeli nation. This would mean self-effacement of an extraordinary kind. It would not be a new cosmopolitan Israel, on the model of cosmopolitan Italy or whatever, but a new phenomenon altogether; quite probably an anti-Israel.

Who knows, a bi-national state might be the way forward for Palestine / Israel (though I have doubts). But it would not be the equivalent to London, New York or Geneva. It would be simply a permanent system of crisis control, like the Irish Good Friday Agreement.

On a final point - might there be a genuine post-national cosmopolitanism? Well, possibly. But it would be on the basis of atomised society, without historical memory, social solidarity or collective aspirations. It would be a human dust of consumers in a hyper-capitalism. Maybe the decline in voting at elections indicates that this is where we are going. I'm not sure that democracy would long survive in the way we know it.