O'Toole Up the Republic!

Towards a New Ireland
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28902-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

In this important book, historians, lawyers, economists and writers come together to put a coherent case: that although the Irish economic collapse has resulted in national humiliation, renewed emigration and a decline in living standards for the majority of the population, there is still hope that the country can be reformed and renewed. Irish politicians offered the now notorious blanket guarantee to all the banks which had got in over their heads during the great property bubble - including one that had become little more than a criminal enterprise. A different set of politicians grimly enforces the consequences of that guarantee, locking an entire generation of Irish men and women into paying for the mistakes of greedy bankers and their corrupt friends in government. The energy of hope has to come from elsewhere. These essays demonstrate how simple measures and different economic and social policies could release that energy and fulfil the promise of an educated, literate and culturally vibrant people.

Fintan O'Toole is one of Ireland's most respected and controversial political and cultural commentators, and an acclaimed biographer and critic. His books include White Savage, A Traitor's Kiss,Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, the number one bestseller Ship of Fools, which Terry Eagleton called 'a brilliant polemic', and its sequel Enough is Enough.He lives in Dublin and is a columnist for the Irish Times.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Toole, Fintan

Leseproben

The Republic as a Tradition and an Ideal in Ireland Today

ISEULT HONOHAN

Introduction

In Ireland, ‘the republic’ is an ideal that is readily invoked but its meaning is not entirely clear and unambiguous. There has been a trend in recent times to reclaim it from its identification with the pursuit of national independence through military means, and to use it to represent a broader and more intangible ideal of the kind of society that Ireland could become, with the implication that this has either not yet been fully realised, or that the country has drifted away from it in various ways. Thus recent invocations speak of ‘realising’, ‘reclaiming’, or ‘renewing’ the republic.

The ideal to which we are being recalled is usually seen as specifically Irish, but within a broader European or Atlantic frame. Here I address what republicanism means in the broader tradition, and the way in which Irish republicanism has fitted into this tradition. I suggest that republicanism has something to offer in our current predicament, and conclude by identifying some challenges that arise, and pitfalls that should be avoided.

Republican Ideals

The broad republican tradition originated in Greece and Rome, and was developed in Italian Renaissance city states (especially Florence), seventeenth-century England and in the American and French Revolutions. Republican ideas were articulated in these contexts by thinkers from Cicero through Machiavelli and Rousseau. There have been many different kinds of republics, and republican ideals have been interpreted in many different ways. But we can identify three principal themes that distinguish republicanism from mainstream liberalism, nationalism and other political traditions.

It expresses a commitment to realising among those who are subject to a common power or government.

This is freedom understood in contrast to slavery, or ‘non-domination’, defined as not being subject to the arbitrary will of others. This is also in contrast to simple ‘non-interference’ – not being interfered with at any one point in time. The danger of domination arises within society from individuals and groups, as well as from the state. To reduce domination by increasing security from the threat of interference – rather than simply providing recourse to law after the event – is quite demanding. It is achieved firstly through political structures that institutionalise the rule of ; a republic, in James Harrington’s term, is ‘the empire of law and not of men’.1 The law must give all citizens a significant and secure equal status that allows each to look the other in the eye.2 In addition, reducing the threat of arbitrary power also requires limiting the concentration of executive power, which can itself be dominating. Thus the rule of law is combined with an emphasis on the dispersal of power – through formal separation of powers, constitutional limits and balances, and measures providing for accountability.

Freedom, on this long-standing and recently rearticulated view, is something that has to be achieved, and it is fragile. It needs more than the legal structures and limits on central-government power that mainstream liberals have tended to emphasise.

The second feature of the republican tradition is an emphasis on . A republic is a polity of self-governing citizens. It is this, rather than either national independence or the absence of a monarch per se that is implied in the republican idea of the sovereignty of the people. As citizens are interdependent, however, their freedom is not so much a matter of individual autonomy or independence, but of participating in determining, to the extent that this is possible, their joint future. As Hannah Arendt put it, ‘the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership is contradictory to the very condition of plurality’.3 To use the metaphor of authorship that is sometimes invoked in this context, it is not so much a matter of being the sole author of one’s life, but being a joint author of the collective life of the polity. It involves the possibility that citizens can be to a greater or lesser extent active in their own self-rule. This may include some degree of representation rather than extensive direct participation, and may be a matter of being enabled and prepared to contest unjust laws and policies rather than continuous involvement in politics; but republicans see politics as a matter of self-government rather than simply representation of interests.

This constitutes one dimension of the ‘active citizenship’ associated with the republican tradition.

It should be noted that in this tradition, citizens are regarded as people who become interdependent, through a common history, and by virtue of being subject to, and potentially dominated by, the same government – a much broader conception than the nationalist idea of citizenship being defined simply by membership of the same national group.

The third feature of republicanism is the idea that a primary goal of politics is shared among citizens. The Latin from which the term ‘republic’ comes, , ‘the public thing’, conveys just this – that the aim of the republic is to provide for the common good, rather than sectional or purely individual interests. This does not mean overriding all individual interests (which would itself constitute domination), but recognising the importance of common interests. Unlike individual interests, common interests are not secured by markets, which even tend to erode them. The rule of law and formal institutions cannot themselves sustain them. This depends also on the attitude of citizens, who internalise the common good, recognise the importance of their common interests, or develop , which essentially means an inclination to put public shared interests before their private interests where necessary. Because there is a natural tension between individual private and common public interests, this too is a fragile achievement; it does not come naturally. The inherent tendency for individuals to put private interests first is one aspect of corruption. Countering it requires education in awareness of the common nature of common interests, and willingness to consider shared interests and the opinions of others. Hence the importance of education in the republican tradition. (See the discussion in Tom Hickey’s essay in this book.) Yet, for republicans personal corruption is part of a wider feature of the fragility of republican self-government, such that institutions tend to decay away from their initial purpose and to need renewal.

This commitment and taking of responsibility constitutes the second dimension of active citizenship.

What Republicanism Is Not

Interpretations of and priorities among these core elements have varied; so have the institutional forms intended to realise them – from unitary to federal, more or less aristocratic to more or less democratic systems. The republic thus cannot be easily identified with any one political form.

The ideal of citizen self-government in the republican tradition is not to be identified simply with ‘pure democracy’ or majoritarian rule; the aim is not so much to rule others as not to be ruled by them. As Machiavelli wrote, the people in a republic ‘neither arrogantly dominate nor humbly serve’.4

In addition, although the equal status of citizens implies that there should be certain limits of inequality among citizens, republicanism does not provide a specific economic and social model; it is not socialism. For early modern republicans dependence could be avoided by citizens only if they were property owners; since then, there has been right- and left-wing republicanism, and it has been combined with egalitarian, socialist, conservative, and other positions, some inherently more compatible with it than others. In Marx’s work reflecting on the rise of Napoleon III from the revolution in France in 1848, , he dismissed as ‘republicans in yellow gloves’ the more socially conservative participants among the divided revolutionaries.

What Republicanism Can Offer Today

Even if it does not provide a blueprint for society or support a particular economic strategy, republican ideas have something to offer in this period of crisis and change. They point at least to some important areas we need to reconsider. It should be borne in mind that republican theory in the past has been developed, not by armchair theorists, but by those in the midst of political crisis from Cicero in the dying days of the Roman republic to Machiavelli in Florence threatened by the domination of the Medici, and James Madison in the early United States, attempting to create new institutions to suit a large modern republic.

The ideals of non-domination, participation in self-government, and the dispersal of power are essential to political reform. This requires not just constructing more efficient institutions, but also...