The history of nationalism in twentieth-century Europe is a deeply controversial subject. Two world wars have made a preoccupation with the concept of a nation-state anathema to many Europeans, not just to Vatican theoreticians of social justice, and quite understandably so. A deeper familiarity with the debates of the great age of nationalisms in Europe, during the proverbial long nineteenth century (1789–1914), can be illuminating in explaining the potential pitfalls for scholars who dare to explore that theme, however. Prior to the First World War and also, to some extent, during the inter war years, Europe experienced what many historians have typified as a cultural mania for building monuments to alleged national icons, including aristocrats and soldiers. To more contemporary eyes, these figures generally seem like ‘romantic and often ridiculous national heroes’, ‘who seem to want to leap from their plinths into some titanic struggle’:
The obvious intensity of their desire to liberate, or resist, is in heroic though doomed contrast to the pigeons perched on the sabre they brandish or the foxing that spots their fading image. They are like the essence of the longings of another age, frozen in time.4
One need only pay a passing visit to the environs of Westminster to see numerous Victorian monuments that sought to encapsulate a nation’s history in stone: from the conscious and symbolical juxtaposition of the Cromwell monument near the Royal Arch within the parliamentary grounds, to the larger-than-life monuments to various prime ministers of Britain’s most imperial days in the facing square. Warlike or not, they fit within this Europe-wide tradition of creating national icons in stone.
Ireland experienced monument building phases of its own, while the most imposing such monument encompassed a debate in itself.5 During 1875, the erection in Dublin of a monument to Daniel O’Connell consciously championed a conception of political liberation that was rooted not in the right granted to Catholics of political representation at the Westminster imperial parliament during 1829. Rather, it was rooted in O’Connell’s election during 1840 as the mayor of a city that was then—in so far as one could still claim the existence of one—the financial capital of the island of Ireland. Simultaneous with O’Connell’s election in Dublin, a foundation stone was laid in Armagh for the building of St Patrick’s Cathedral for the Catholic Primate of All Ireland, while young Trinity College students, soon represented by the Young Ireland circle behind the Nation, began an enthusiastic and pioneering debate upon Irish nationalism. This was a world of great debate and enthusiasm that was very familiar to the young Arthur Griffith and it shaped his world and imagination.
Today, near the O’Connell monument stands two twentieth-century monuments to express a very different sense of Irish identity. In addition to a sense of identity, these monuments express a deep sense of conflict. Nevertheless, one of these figures appears equally as triumphant as O’Connell. This is a monument to the international labour activist James Larkin, who represented the ideal of promoting labour political activism without consideration of national political boundaries and a consequent complete detestation and rejection of the nationalist idea of Irish self-government espoused by Arthur Griffith. Nearby, the seemingly heroic and eternal figure of Larkin is a monument to a self-consciously Irish nationalist, yet very small, rebellion that was organised by friends of Griffith during 1916. This is a monument with very noticeably defeatist or fatalistic overtones. It takes the form of a pre-historic Fenian who is seemingly dying a slow and agonising death for all eternity. It stands barely visible through the window of a post office, like an embarrassment that should be forgotten, as the general public passes by with understandable indifference or even repulsion at such a grotesque sight: it seems to represent a life-denying death wish.
These two monuments, erected almost a century after the initial O’Connell monument, may perhaps be said to be an Irish reflection of a broader international trend. The schoolboy histories of nationalist battles and iconic soldiers that were sold to a century of European youths stand indicted today as a cultural phenomenon similar to that which once absurdly sent hundreds of thousands of young men charging into machine-gun fire during two world wars. Between the age of O’Connell and the two world wars, however, stands the lifetime of Arthur Griffith. If the European tradition of monument building reflects anything in terms of the culture of Irish society then it must surely be that Griffith’s lifetime represents a culture that is now alien to the historical imagination to such an extent that the employment of sympathetic analyses— such as is first required to develop understanding of any historical subject matter—is one that is likely to be in relatively short supply whenever it is applied to Griffith or his contemporaries. This is an understandable but also relatively debilitating trend in historical studies.
The history of Europe during the long nineteenth century (1789–1914) was not a story of unrelenting warfare—although it certainly experienced its fair share of horrific wars—but of ‘revolutions in science, technology, transport, communications and commerce’, moving ‘colossal quantities of people, raw materials, crafted and manufactured goods from one corner of the globe to another at unprecedented speeds’. This was the essence of modernisation. Meanwhile, in politics, ‘dynamic new forces’ stood together ‘in uneasy balance’: ‘if liberalism was a characteristic response to these currents, so too was its cousin, revolutionary nationalism’.6 All the conventional vocabulary of political journalists during the post-1918 age of universal suffrage—speaking of concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’— were a century earlier, or at least up until the 1848 rebellions in Europe (when the franchise was less than one per cent of adult males in most countries), almost exclusively the language of strange secret societies, or conspiracy brotherhoods, who were imagining brave new worlds.7 By the time of Griffith’s youth, with the formation of the Third Republic in France, these terminologies had slowly but surely begun to enter into the discourse of British university students as well as a new world of political journalism, with national circulations and aimed at a skilled working-class readership. This was the world of letters into which Griffith emerged. With this development also came the rise of a preoccupation with the hitherto revolutionary notion of establishing balanced state constitutions.
Historically, most European countries were based upon legal systems that employed precepts that were rooted not least in church traditions that emphasised the importance of placing the spirit of the law above the letter of the law. This was also a basis of the common law tradition. However, this consensus was challenged to its core in the wake of a Napoleonic Empire that introduced a strict civil code as a legal basis for national governments and administrations in the conquered territories. Would-be revolutionaries—generally typifying themselves as ‘republicans’ (then a catch-all phrase for ‘nationalists’, ‘liberals’, ‘democrats’ and ‘socialists’)—imagined during the post-Napoleonic era that the revival and maintenance of this tradition of civil codes was essentially to the process of modernisation and the creation of progressive constitutions; a concept then generally associated with that of the nation-state. In modern times, Ireland had always been a common law country. During the nineteenth century, as part of the United Kingdom, it remained one. The rise of nationalism did, however, stimulate debate in Ireland on the meaning of constitutions that mirrored developments throughout Europe in the wake of the French revolution. In this world of debate, in a manner comparable to the twentieth-century phenomenon of Marxism, the foreign offices of each of the European powers (perhaps most notably that of Britain) frequently sought to influence the tenor of debate within all potential rival countries for their own purposes. As a result, contemporaries throughout Europe were