Home rule -- Ireland; Ulster (Northern Ireland and Ireland) -- Politics and government; Unionism (Irish politics)
We have seen that in almost every conflict between English and Irish
ideas the latter have had the justification of success. This holds good
also as regards our long insistence on nationality as a principle of
political organisation. In various passages of the nineteenth century it
seemed to be gravely compromised. Capital, its mobility indefinitely
increased by the improved technique of exchange, became essentially a
citizen of the world. The earth was all about it where to choose; its
masters, falsely identifying patriotism with the Protectionism then
dominant, struck at both, and the Free Trade movement philosophised
itself into cosmopolitanism. Labour, like capital, showed a rapid
tendency to become international or rather supernational. "The workers,"
proclaimed Marx, "have no fatherland." While this was the drift of ideas
in the economic sphere, that in the political was no more favourable.
Belgium seemed on the point of extinction, Italy was a mere geographical
expression, Hungary was abject and broken. In the narrower but even
more significant sphere of British colonial policy the passion for
centralisation had not yet been understood in all its folly. Downing
Street still functioned as the Dublin Castle of the Empire. The
possibility of the overseas possessions developing that rich, strong
individuality which characterises them to-day would have been dismissed
with horror. The colour and texture of men's thought on these subjects
has undergone a notable transformation. Cosmopolitanism of the old type
is a slain hallucination. Capital in our time is not content to be a
patriot, it is a Jingo. As to labour, if we turn to its politics we find
Herr Bebel declaring that the German socialist is first of all a German,
and Mr Ramsay MacDonald pledging his adherents to support any war
necessary for the assertion of English prestige. If we turn to its
theoretical sociology we find the national idea rehabilitated and
triumphant.
Such intellectual reconstructions do not, as a rule, begin in England,
or find in English their characteristic formulae. Mr Blatchford might
indeed be cited, but it is in the brilliant literature of German Social
Democracy that the most scientific expression of the new spirit is to be
sought. Truly Marx has been indeed translated. His abstract and
etiolated internationalism has been replaced by the warm humanity of
writers like, say, David or Pernerstorfer. The principle of nationality
is Vindicated by the latter in a noble passage. I quote it from
Sombart's "Socialism and the Social Movement."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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