B2 The Daily of Geopolitical Europe. News. Files. Reflections. Reports

European historyReadsWeekend

“The History of Ireland”: its neutrality, its attachment to Europe

(BRUXELLES2) The green island has a past full of violence, a past which until recently was still expressed by violence and attacks in the north, and a fierce attachment to neutrality in the south.

The last part of the book by Pierre Joannon, one of the best French specialists on Ireland, will interest all those interested in the anti-guerrilla struggle and its process of resolution, such as those who want to understand the springs of the Irish mentality, of its political organization from the birth of the Republic of Ireland to the present day. The book goes back much further but it was this last part that first attracted me (I will now go back in time). This work restores just as much as the facts, the political context, without the cumbersomeness of traditional historical writing. Which is nice.

The Irish Neutrality Gene

Without this immersion in history, one cannot understand, for example, the reaction of the Irish population with regard to the Treaty of Lisbon or to identify the divisions between political parties, between North and South. Everything that fueled the war for decades in Northern Ireland. Like the notion of neutrality that has crossed the Irish ages. "Neutrality corresponded to the deep desire of the nationalist component of the Irish population. In February 1927, that is to say even before the Fianna Fail made its views prevail, Kivin o'Higgins had declared before the Dail: " the neutrality of the Free State (Ireland) is an end which must be earnestly desired." (...) In 1936, when the League of Nations was unable to prevent Italy from seizing Abyssinia, "De Valera promptly drew the consequences. On June 18, 1936, he declared before the Dail Eireann (the Irish assembly) that neutrality was henceforth the only recourse of small States: “The League of Nations has lost the confidence of the peoples of the world. We can no longer give him credit… The small European states must provide for their own defence… We must be neutral”.

Attachment to Europe

The attachment to Europe also seems attached to the independence of the Republic. As Todd Andrews, veteran of the War of Independence, and companion of Eamon de Valera, one of the fathers of the Irish Republic, said: I have always had the conviction that Ireland had no other choice, if it wanted to survive as an entity distinct from the Anglo-Saxon world which surrounded it on all sides, but to identify with the European continent culturally and, if possible economically ". The author adds (further on):What Europe brings most invaluably to the Irish is of another order (than economic development): even more than the possibility of energizing an economy in search of outlets, it is the opening up of energies and mentalities, the end of an oppressive tete-a-tete which translates into the establishment of peaceful relations with a neighbor on whom one feels less dependent, the attachment to the continent of a conscience freed from the weights of history and geography, and trust that this shared destiny will end up relegating the violent upheavals of the North to the warehouse of old forgotten quarrels. "

• “ History of Ireland and the Irish by Pierre Joannon (Perrin editions, Pocket, Paris, 832 p., 12 euros)

Nicolas Gros Verheyde

Chief editor of the B2 site. Graduated in European law from the University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and listener to the 65th session of the IHEDN (Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale. Journalist since 1989, founded B2 - Bruxelles2 in 2008. EU/NATO correspondent in Brussels for Sud-Ouest (previously West-France and France-Soir).

s2Member®