Belfast, Basra, Baghdad... New Labour's steadfast support for the US invasion of trag has raised again the debate on the nature of imperialism. Blair's 'civilising mission' aims to remake the world in the image of his own 'decent', liberal and Christian values. His main foreign policy adviser, Robert Cooper, calls for a 'new age of empire'. This article by David Coen examines some of the lessons from Ireland in the fight against the new imperialism. new labours for a new American century? Tutors in imperialism Blair's hero is William Gladstone, nineteenth century Liberal imperialist who began his political career as an advocate of the missionary and muscular Christianity that dominated the establishment, including the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.' Blair displays a Gladstonian zeal for demolishing all obstacles to 'free trade' in the name of democracy and human rights. Reporting on Blair's recent visit to Libya, BBC 1 See Roy Jenkins Political Correspondent Andrew Marr opined (1995) Gladstone. that President Gaddafi had 'exchanged support Macmillan. 2 For a critical, for terrorism for free trade. But Iraq is the main even anti-imperialist case in point. Apart from the opportunities for history of the British Empire, see Denis mercenaries and freebooting business firms - Judd (2001) Empire. also a very traditional aspect of imperialism? - Phoenix Press. Iraq has provided the opportunity for the newer 3 See Michael Farrell (1976) Northern imperial power to be tutored by the British on Ireland: The Orange how to manage low intensity warfare. British State, Pluto Press: See also p 54 for a commentators never tire of attributing the, as mark one version of yet, low casualty rate in the British occupation the current peace zone of Southern Iraq to their army's experience process. of 'peacekeeping' in Ireland. 4 Because the peace agreement is so similar; Seamus It is true that, as the recent BBC 3 documen- Mallon, former leader of the SDLP, tary Battle of the Bogside showed, the British has described the Army was at first welcomed in o Derry and current agreement Belfast in 1969 in preference to the RUC and as 'Sunningdale for slow learners". the B Specials. Of course when it became 5 See Kevin Kelley clear that the army had been sent in precisely (1982) The Longest War: Northern because the RUC and the B Specials had taken Ireland and the IRA, a pasting from the nationalists in Derry, atti- Zed Press/Brandon tudes changed. After Bloody Sunday on 30 Books. 6 See Roger January 1972, when the British Army shot Faligot (1983) The dead fourteen civilians on a Civil Rights dem- Kitson Experiment: onstration in Derry, hundreds joined the Provi- Britain's Military Strategy in Ireland,. sional IRA. They understood that the undemo- Zed Press/Brandon cratic six-County state, carved out of Ireland in Books. HISTORY / THEORY infamous Special Powers Act? particular fan. Government being condemned by Justice for the abuse of human rights." 'psy-ops"" 1921 under Lloyd George's threat of 'immediate and terrible war', could not grant civil rights because to do so would undermine the state's very foundation. More importantly, they were aware that behind the Unionist regime which maintained the 'Protestant State for a Protestant people' stood the British State. In particular, the , introduced in April 1922, gave unlimited powers to the Unionist Government "to preserve peace and maintain order. Not surprisingly, it was the envy of dictators around the world, including Vorster of South Africa who was a Even pre-Blair, Labour was never averse to attempting military solutions in Ireland. After Loyalist opposition brought down the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement*, the new Labour Government - firstly under Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees and then under Roy Mason, the self-styled 'hammer of the IRA' - adopted a three-pronged strategy dubbed 'Ulsterisation'. This involved I) handing over responsibility for the war to the RUC and the UDR in order to cut the politically embarrassing number of British casualties; 2) criminalisation of the resistance, most notably by the withdrawal of political status from prisoners in March 1976, which culminated in the 1981 Hunger Strikes; 3) the institution of the no-jury Diplock Courts which convicted hundreds of people on the basis of 'confessions' beaten out of them in the notorious Castlereagh Army Barracks. The overall aim of the Ulsterisation policy was to portray the struggle as a criminal conspiracy, an "internal' problem and to lessen the international heat on Britain over its repressive policies, which eventually led to the British the International Court of The British war effort always included a strong element of portraying the IRA as gangsters or sectarian killers and seeking to amplify through a compliant media the human consequences of low intensity warfare. One of the main results of the Ulsterisation policy and its portrayal of the conflict as a civil war, with the British neutrally holding the line between two religious groups, was to foster the very sectarianism that ••• Page 22 Socialist Outlook spring, 2004 issue_003
•&• they claimed to be trying to prevent. When Ulsterisation failed (mainly as a result of the 1981 Hunger Strikes) the British tactic in the late 1980s of using Loyalist paramilitaries to terrorise the Nationalist population was more effective in forcing the IRA into a ceasefire. So promoting sectarianism was a vital component maintaining British rule in the North, a sectarianism institutionalised in the Stormont Agreement of 1999. The other rationalisation for Britain's colonialist 'civilising mission' is of course the very widespread idea that native peoples were incapable of governing themselves; this has a long pedigree both in Ireland and in other parts of the empire, particularly in relation to Africa. For example, Herbert Morrison, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the post - 1945 government opined that, '...independence for underdeveloped countries like those of Africa would be' like giving a child of ten a latch key, a bank account and a shotgun'? Nice Imperialism? Why was the British army sent back on to the streets in the North and why does confusion over the nature of imperialism continue to cloud the left's approach to the British state and therefore what a revolutionary strategy might require? Even if you accept the argument that Britain's interests are not best served by direct polit- ical control - and that the role of the left is to help it to withdraw by supporting the Stormont Agreement (the position of the fragment of the Labour Committee on Ireland describing itself as Friends of the Good Friday Agreement, an analysis shared by Sinn Fein) - you are still left with the problem of explaining why Britain is willing to pay indefinitely the smaller but still significant fiscal and military price of governing Northern Ireland. The get- out clause for the revolutionary left® is that the Agreement creates the space for real class politics to operate, as if the thirty-year war was a backward deviation from the true development of politics rather than a long drawn out battle in the death of the old empire? The main argument of Official Sinn Fein (later the Workers Party and now merged with the Irish Labour Party) was that the increasing involvement of US capital in the twenty-six Counties in the 1960s and 1970s, meant it, rather than British capital, was the main enemy. Allied to this was the argument that, as the whole post-war decolonisation process had shown, trading relations did not require direct political control. Finally, in an argument that prefigures the debate about globalisation, membership of the EU anyway made national borders (and historic trading patterns) less important. Practically, this meant a focus on purely trade union issues while shutting out discussion of the political fact of British control. The flipside of this was a ferocious legal, political and sometimes physical attack on the Provisionals for their supposed sectarianism. "The British Government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland..:'" declared the then Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke in November 1990. Historically, as Marx had pointed out, the British hold on Ireland as far back as the 1801 Act of Union was necessary as a source of food, labour and military recruits. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was the added inducement of a significant market and the shipbuilding and armaments factories along the river Lagan as well as the 'kith and kin' argument in the mutinous posturing of the Conservative and Unionist Party issue 003 spring, 2004 Socialist Outlook Page 23 and World Bank, and free trade. Movement. Defeat would "The deal with the new imperialism. in the pre-World War One period. It is also true that the North of Ireland was and remains an undue drain on the British exchequer especially in the light of the post-war retreat from empire. What Brooke's come-on to the Republicans left out was the real interest of the British - maintaining stable bourgeois rule. In other words, private property, abiding by the rules of bodies such as the IMF Of course free trade needs to be backed by force, as Blair's mentor Gladstone knew only too well. The British State is therefore prepared to pay around f5 billion a year for the military and political defeat of the main forces that threaten it in Ireland - the Republican 7 See Juda (2001) P.327 be unthinkable, 8 For example the destabilising not just the Unionist regime in the CPGB's 1 count North but also the Dublin Government who fear and 4 half count militant republicans even more than the British self-determination for the British Irish' do. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement is the best within an Irish example of the Dublin ruling class clinging to Federal republic. See the British in the face of a fiscal crisis combined http://www.cpgb.org. uk/worker/301/par- with the rise of the Republican Movement in tynotes.html. For the the aftermath of the Hunger Strikes. Dublin's SWP's vacillations on this see my article explicit aim was to pose as the protectors of "The SWP and the Northern nationalists, thereby attempting to Stormont Agreement undermine the Republicans. The high cost of - The bread and butter of revolution- all this is considered worth paying in the wider ary politics? in: interests of British capital: the impact of being Socialist Outlook seen to be defeated by insurgents in Ireland (old series) #50 at http://www. would have a long term destabilising effect on labournet.org. all British overseas investment which accounts uk/so/50index.html for a high percentage of its profits." Moreover, 9 For analysis of the state of capitalists have always calculated their own the Good Friday individual return without much concern for Agreement after the recent elections in the overall costs to the state of sustaining their Northern Ireland see John McAnulty in Emancipation and Liberation, No. 7 For that reason the British will attempt to Spring 2004. remain in Ireland until they are entirely certain 10 See-hitp://cain. ulst.ac.uk/othelem/ that what they leave behind poses no threat people/biography/ whatsoever to capital. The bourgeoisie North bpeople.htm and South, divided and weakened by partition 11 Total earnings (net of losses) on have, up to now at least, been in no position direct and portfolio to guarantee the stability of the island if the investments (f42 bil- British left. It may be that the attachment of lion) were equivalent to more than 6 per the Southern Irish ruling class to the project cent of GDP in of European unity makes that outcome less 1995. Allowing for uncertain but the British ruling class is divided revaluation of assets through appreciation and exchange rate changes, this rises to more than 12 per Ironically, just as New Labour seemed to cent of GDP. To have scored a historic victory for the new put this figure in imperialism in persuading the Republicans to context, earnings on visible exports disarm, accept partition and shoot dissidents were equivalent to who oppose the peace deal, the Unionist relic about 22 per cent of GDP in 1995. (latest of the old empire on which British rule was figures to hand) The based, is fragmented and in historic decline, UKs stock of direct economically and politically. Finding reliable overseas investment is more, in relation allies could prove just as difficult in Iraq. And 1o GDP, than for any a present willingness to use armed struggle is other G7 country: not a reliable guide as to whether, in the long http://archive. ireasury.gov.uk/pub/ term, the resistance would be willing to cut a html/top/top8/sum. himl HISTORY / THEORY