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Principal Address Professor John Horne
Ireland at the Crossroad, 1920-21: Nation, Empire, Partition Professor John Horne An tOllamh John Horne
A Uachtaráin agus a chairde. Thank you, President Higgins, for inviting me to address this second session of Machnamh 100 on the events of a century ago. You asked me to put them in a wider context. It is no easy task. Nothing less was at stake in 1920-1921 than Ireland’s sovereignty, its contested future, its fractured territory and the outcome of a war. A crossroad – that still shapes our lives today. Yet it was, indeed, part of a wider context, a ‘world crisis’, and reflecting on this may help us to think about our national history.1 However, this is not history for history’s sake. You also ask us to think about ‘ethical commemoration’. I take this seriously and shall return to it at the end.2 But first, and bearing it in mind, let me reflect on Ireland’s crossroad in terms of nation, empire and partition, through all of which runs the theme of violence.
1. Nation Ireland a century ago, we know, was embroiled in a war fought in the name of Irish sovereignty by nationalists and opposed not just by the British but by those in Ireland who wished to preserve the union. Put thus, it has the ring of inevitability. That comes from what went before (the home rule crisis, the Great War, Easter 1916, the rise of Sinn Féin) and from what came after, including our eventual Republic. Also, nationality has since become the basis of statehood and citizenship worldwide. In 1948 the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights made it an entitlement for everyone.3 So, it seems to me vital to break this teleology and recall just how fluid relations between nation, state and empire were in the era of the First World War (1912-23) and how diverse the sources of sovereignty (by which I mean political authority).
1
The phrase is Winston Churchill’s, from the title of his precocious history, The World Crisis, (London: Thornton Butterworth, 192331), 5 vols. The feeling that the war was both world-wide and had provoked a ‘crisis’ was a general one.
2
I have addressed this issue in the volume co-edited with Edward Madigan, Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013), esp. pp. 169-75 (Conclusion).
3
Article 15 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that: ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality’.
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