Read: Sovereignty And Economic Recovery

From: Irish Foreign Affairs: Editorials

Date: January, 2010

By: Editorial

Sovereignty And Economic Recovery

Fianna Fáil-Green governance of the economic crisis has operated to date on foreign policy instinct. The manner in which the crisis unfolded and negative commentary on Irish policy by British and European politicians and the British/Irish press has made this necessarily so. As Irish economic meltdown and the alleged hollowness of the “Celtic Tiger” were being proclaimed from London’s Fleet Street, and reiterated in our national press, the country’s credit worthiness went into freefall. Whatever about possible alternatives, the Irish Bank Guarantee Scheme, denounced by EU President Sarkozy among others, rapidly stabilised the financial system and was soon being emulated elsewhere. This occurred against a background of the failure of the Euro-Zone to operate as a coherent currency interest in the global crisis. A cabal of European Big powers (including the hostile Sterling currency zone) presumed Lisbon gave them a basis for functioning on behalf of ‘Europe’ and they proceeded to do so. But, though the Bank Guarantee, and subsequently the creation of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) and the December 2009 budget – again whatever about possible alternatives – the Irish Government created the type of basis for recovery that has restored national and international confidence (the core factor in functioning capitalism) without resorting to society-destroying deflationism pur. The state operated competently and apparently successfully in the face of UK-EU advice to the contrary.

This functioning on instinct in a crisis has had a healthy de-Anglicising effect on Government and gave it something of an independent sense of purpose. The public has slowly been given to understand that while GDP has fallen 13% in the last year, and may well fall another few percentage points, and unemployment has risen to over 12%, these must be set against GDP having grown by 135% in the previous fifteen years, the workforce having doubled to 2.3m and general standards of living having risen to among the highest in the world, a position that is obviously unrepresentative of actual Irish wealth creation but enjoyable while it lasted. Managing a “landing” in the new global economic reality is the programme the Government is offering. The balance at the end of the Celtic Tiger is that a giant leap forward in economic and social terms has ended in a relatively small step back. In per capita GDP terms Ireland is still – incredibly - the second richest society in Europe. Panic measures were avoided and, despite the stalling of the social partnership process, the budget indicates that the project of creating a “social market economy” on the European model was not abandoned. The failure to produce a social partnership agreement has not been accompanied by the unravelling of the many layers of “social dialogue” it produced in its heyday. The willingness of public sector workers to take staggering cuts in take-home pay (in the order of an average of 15%) as a first stage in the process shows a degree of social solidarity that one would have believed had gone out of fashion. The social state was not deconstructed but trimmed and consolidated.

This act of economic sovereignty seems to have rubbed off on other areas of Government too. Following the desultory record of Irish foreign policy during the arrogant period of Irish-UK collaboration in the EU, hints of De Valeraism have re-emerged in the state’s responses to the world, most notably in the position adopted internationally and at EU Council of Ministers level in relation to Palestine since Israel’s onslaught on Gaza a year ago. Foreign Minister Micheál Martín, despite the disappointing grasp of history revealed in his book on Cork politics published last year, can be given credit for this.

Irish Foreign Affairs is under no illusion about the intellectual health of Fianna Fáil. Half a dozen years ago, Bertie Ahern, motivated perhaps by Peace Process goodwill, said we should keep open the option of rejoining the Commonwealth. Martin Mansergh, the party intellectual, had after all been assiduously cultivating a framework of thought on Anglo-Irish matters for over a decade conducive to such a change in direction by the state. All of this coincided with a marked retreat in Irish EU policy from a European integration line. The strategic alliance with France and Germany carefully nurtured by Haughey and Reynolds (and to some extent by Fitzgerald before them) was thrown away in favour of an ever closer alignment of the state with the UK in EU matters. Over the last year of economic crisis the state has paid dearly for its relative isolation in the EU resulting from this ill-judged foreign policy alignment. Hopefully we will now see some initiative in a new direction in the stormy post-Lisbon months ahead.

The assertion of a sovereign line in economic policy in the current crisis has stabilised the Cowen government, and relocated the political crisis to the opposition. In a special New Year Editorial (2nd January 2010), The Irish Times conceded with blatant displeasure that the Fianna Fáil-Green government was making “considerable strides in handling the crisis”. It continued, however, with a bizarre warning on the dangers of nationalism (“protectionism on a national scale and domination by vested interests on a local scale”). The opposition had little to offer, having “spent much of the past decade fruitlessly waiting for a devastating tribunal disclosure which would propel them into office.” Leaving aside the fact that Tara Street had not a little to do with this state of affairs, the editorial went on to warn that the opposition seemed to be facing into a looming election with little or nothing to say. The point was driven home by political correspondent Stephen Collins, who had once worked for the Sunday Press. He urged opposition leaders to start telling the public what they would do differently in government, or risk remaining in opposition: “If the Opposition parties are not seen to be facing up to the issues in an election that is about policies rather than personalities Fianna Fáil could actually stage a bit of a comeback”. Such a scenario apparently was to be prevented at all costs.

Former Fine Gael leader Garret Fitzgerald caused something of a sensation a few months ago when he called on Fine Gael to forget its “Good Bank” proposal, realise that the state was facing a crisis of economic survival and, in that context, facilitate it in getting the McCarthy Report implemented, NAMA securely onto the statute book and a tough deflationary budget through the Dáil. He presumed that such measures were only possible against the will of the population as they would entail a high cost in social expenditure. Electoral considerations could be returned to thereafter (‘Government must not fall until crucial measures implemented’, Irish Times, 29 August 2009).

Within a week Alan Dukes - another former Fine Gael leader, who twenty years ago had championed what he had wrongly presumed to be Haughey’s Thatcherite recovery plan of 1987 – also threw cold water on Fine Gael’s plans, describing its “Good Bank” as “very cumbersome, very doubtful of success and much less clear than the NAMA proposal” (Irish Times, 6 September 2009).

Though the Government acted other than predicted, Fitzgerald’s article collapsed the opposition, a collapse from which it has yet to recover.

The Irish Times is keen to fill the void occupying the space that should be the mind of the opposition. Stephen Collins in his article recommended a policy platform of property tax, electoral reform and general anti-corruptionism, while the editorial urged a foreign policy alignment that countered the threat of “protectionism on a national scale”. This alternative was presented in a column by John Bruton, another former Fine Gael leader and, until recently, EU ambassador to the US. The editorial endorsed Bruton’s thoughts on foreign policy and recommended them to the opposition as part of their approach to winning a general election. Fine Gael/Labour would be well advised to ignore this advice.

Bruton declared the end of the nation state and proposed a world system in which the will of the “international community” was enforced politically and militarily. America and China must learn to subordinate themselves to this will. This would mean somehow preventing interference from Congress in US foreign policy. European nations – including Ireland - should abandon separate foreign policy positions and combine as one of the powers submerged in the leadership of the “international community” ( ‘Nation state model no longer works in today's complex world’, The Irish Times, 2nd January 2010).

The naivety of this view of the world is breath-taking. John Bruton had an innings as Finance Minister in the 1980s and as Taoiseach of the Rainbow Coalition of 1994-97. He had a tendency in opposition to advocate socially divisive and uninspired foreign policy positions, but in power abandoned these and worked creatively with the options inherited, notably in finance, the Peace Process and social partnership. He was a competent and effective Taoiseach, but failed the only electoral test the Rainbow faced, in 1997. After he subsequently lost the Fine Gael leadership he rose rapidly through the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and from there stepped into the role of EU ambassador to the US, a position which ended recently.

Since ceasing to run a state he has developed the idea that the “nation state” is redundant and has advocated an alternative. In 2004 he was keynote speaker at the first (and only) conference of the ‘Reform Movement’ - a grouping that campaigns for the Anglicisation of Irish matters and advocates an Irish return to the British Commonwealth. He told the Movement that the system of nation states “established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648” was redundant and declared his adherence to the alternative “vision” of John Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary Party leader who broke with IPP anti-imperialist tradition when he hitched Ireland to Britain’s ‘Great War’ in 1914. Bruton has continued to propagate this position. In 2008 he declared the 1916 Rising a “waste of time” and claimed that Redmond had been a “federalist” who believed that Ireland “could do best as an autonomous part of a wider comity of equal nations, linked together by a Senate, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as England, Scotland and Wales.” He gave the following interpretation of Redmond’s great achievement:

“The record will show that the constitutional nationalist leadership in achieving Home Rule had created an Irish Parliament with substantial powers and capable of making the case for a progressive addition to those powers. It retained continued representation of all of Ireland at Westminster thus providing, in the event of Partition, a vital form of protection for Northern Nationalists which did not exist in the Treaty of 1921.” (- John Bruton, ‘Why 1916 was a waste of time’, Sunday Independent, 12 April 2008).

Of course Redmond achieved no such thing. Following the suspension of the Home Rule Bill and the installation of the unelected Unionist War Coalition in Britain in 1915 which reversed the previous Liberal Government’s promises to the Irish Party, all-Ireland Home Rule was dead in the water. By 1918 and as a direct outcome of the failure of the IPP Great War project, the southern Irish population had moved way beyond Home Rule and overwhelmingly voted for the establishment of a sovereign Republic. As regards his “vision” of a “wider comity of equal nations” made up of the Anglo-Saxon/Celtic bits of the British Empire (with the other bits in subordinate child-nation roles), his naivety regarding the prospect of Irish “equality” with the state then commanding the most powerful empire in the world defies belief.

What Britain’s war had shown more than anything else was that ‘Small Nations’ were going to have to look after themselves in the World Order created at Versailles. The ‘Rights of Nations to Self Determination’ proclaimed in Allied wartime propaganda was firmly and solely to be applied to the peoples of the non-Allied multi-national powers, even where those peoples had never sought it. In the Irish case, it was forced by the Imperial power to defend in arms its democratically declared sovereignty against the counter-insurgency forces sent by that Imperial power to suppress it. In his recent New Year Irish Times article, Bruton sees it as “ironic” that the “United States that pioneered the idea of a League of Nations, of a United Nations, as a binding global rule maker” refuses to submit itself to international law. He goes on to bemoan the fact that “big nations, like the US and China, clung to the old and bankrupt notion than nations should be absolutely sovereign inside their own territory and should not be bound by global rules.” But the US, though it had created the League of Nations, never joined it (the US democracy would not countenance the idea that its sovereignty could be subject to an international organisation). Britain and France ran the League thereafter, and ensured that its role of “global rule maker” applied to everyone but themselves. When Roosevelt created the United Nations in 1945 it was as a “global rule maker” dominated by five veto-empowered Great Powers (“the policemen of the world”) who would make “international law” to keep the rest of the peoples of the planet in their place. This followed a further World War in which Allied commitments to “small nations” had again been trumpeted in the ‘Atlantic Charter’ of 1941 – though only after Churchill had secured a commitment from Roosevelt that it the British Empire would be exempt from its provisions.

The world in which the UN is the supposed “global rule maker” is a very unequal place. Small states with a will to survive have rapidly made pragmatic arrangements – where allowed – to enable them to do so, and have not relied on the UN. Various agglomerations such as the UN, EU etc. have yet to seriously supersede in any way the need for states to act pragmatically in their interests. In the globalised world, whatever sentimental tribute might be paid to such international arrangements or useful agreements made through them, the reality remains that the only thing that stands between the individual and global chaos or domination by others is the state. It has not been superseded in any substantial way, including by the EU, as the recent economic crisis demonstrated all too clearly.

John Bruton’s views on the nation state in history are also seriously flawed. In his latest article he again returned to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, at which, he claims “the concept of the modern nation state was devised” and, following it, “the nation state was a perfectly workable means to organise world affairs, and remained so for centuries” (‘Nation state model no longer works in today's complex world’, The Irish Times, 2nd January 2010). In fact Westphalia simply involved the arrangement of state matters in Europe at the end of the Wars of Religion, re-organising relations between powerful states established by military force through the religious wars. None of the new or old states involved either was or regarded itself as a “nation state”.

The idea of the “people” and popular sovereignty underlying the “nation state” was forged in the French Revolution a century and a half later and only gained a type of general currency in the 19th century. The idea that popular sovereignty was only possible through the formation of separate “nation states” was considered by many European peoples in 1848 but disregarded by most, who went on instead to seek to reform in their interests the larger entities in which they lived. Most “nation states” – apart from the imperial states - only arose later when the larger entities in which various peoples co-existed were wilfully destroyed from outside (notably the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, destroyed by Britain) or where the larger entity could not bear to contain national groupings except on the basis of total assimilation (the British Empire in relation to Ireland or the Russian and German in relation to Poland).

It was the destruction of non-“progressive” agglomerations which never sought to assimilate their nationalities into a conformist common culture and language, like the evolving Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman “empires”, that left peoples - if they wished to survive in the jungle created at Versailles in 1919 - with little choice other than to organise themselves as nation states. The scramble to do so characterised the disastrous history of Europe and the Middle East between the Wars and, in destroying – among other things - the framework for the trans-empire Jewish middle class, created the political anti-Semitism of the interwar years that made the Holocaust possible. The breakup of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire was the result of the dogmatic stipulation of Britain and the US of a compulsory “Right to National Self-Determination” in nation-state form at the end of World War One, applicable only and compulsorily to the territories of the defeated powers. The nationalism of small nations played no role in the causes of the First World War, except perhaps the outside manipulation of it in the case of Serbia. To claim the situation in the world today to be anything like that of Europe in 1914 flies in the face of historical fact.

Bruton regrets the arrangement of non-binding political agreements rather than binding rules that characterise current world governance on matters such as Climate Change. He believes:

“As in 1914, we now live in an interdependent world, where no one power is any longer completely dominant, and where there is no properly functioning system for making binding decisions collectively between nations. We are instead relying on a series of ad hoc arrangements of the very kind world leaders tried before the First World War Those arrangements did not suffice when the crisis erupted between Austria and Serbia in July 1914... Anyone who studies the history of Europe between the years 1900 and 1914 will see how dangerously weak and ineffective such political understandings can prove to be.”

World governance where even medium powers voluntarily make their interests subservient to the will of the “international community” is and always has been a myth. His analogy with 1914 makes little sense, as in fact there was a functional ‘balance of power’ which was deliberately disrupted by Britain in pursuit of the elimination of an emerging industrial rival that threatened its pre-eminent position in world power. The only alternative to balanced arrangements between powers, states, regions etc. is domination by a few of them. Bruton seems unable to see Britain operating either in 1914 or now in its own interest on the world stage and be prone to locate the problems of world governance among foreigners. His blindness in relation to the realities of the UN and power in the modern world is of a kind with his blindness in relation to the project Redmond proposed to Ireland in 1914 of a future as a junior partner in a world dominating empire.

The chaos of the Eurozone in the face of global economic crisis led Ireland to act as if it had the measure of the new EU: it did what was required to get them off its back (passed Lisbon) then proceeded to act unilaterally to ensure its own survival, falling back in the process on its De Valerist instincts. If the approach to the world being proposed instead by John Bruton and The Irish Times is indeed adopted by the opposition leaders it would be surprising if it formed the basis of an election victory for them. Irish Foreign Affairs would advise them to disregard it.

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