Anarchism and Nationalism - Ireland

Ireland

The anarcho-Platformist Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM) has produced a number of articles and essays on the relationship between Anarchism and Irish Republicanism over the years. Their position, roughly, is that Anarchism and Republicanism are incompatible and opposed to each other but that Anarchists can and should learn things from Ireland's long history of struggle. In their analysis Republicanism has always been split between rich people who want to rule directly and working class movements that demand social equality and community self governance instead of simply trading foreign bosses for local ones.

In Ireland in the 1790's we had a mass republican movement influenced by the American and then the French revolutions. That movement included those who favored a radical leveling agenda as well as the democratic agenda of mainstream republicans. Edward Fitzgerald, the military planner of the rising was one such proponent. But it also contained those like Wolfe Tone who saw an independent Ireland as opening up its own colonies in the Caribbean. In the north Henry Joy McDonald had to remove the existing United Irish leadership paralyzed by fear of the mob seizing property before the rising there could get underway, weeks after it had begun in the south. After its defeat and before his execution he warned future republicans to beware that "the rich always betray the poor." ... This process was mirrored in republican movements elsewhere. Left republicans would build real popular struggle but then be confronted with the need to preserve national unity in the face of the wealthy republicans whose funds were often needed for arms backing off because they feared for their privilege. And this is where we find the roots of the early anarchist movement... So in terms of historical development anarchism and republicanism have a lot in common, in fact anarchism is arguably an off shoot of republicanism, an off shoot that emerged for the first time in the 1860's but has emerged on other occasions since then including in 1970's Ireland where some of those leaving the official republican movement became anarchists while other anarchists were joining both provisional and official republican movements.

According to this analysis, Anarchism is the successor to left-nationalism, a working class movement working to achieve the liberation that the Republican movements that toppled the worlds monarchies in the last two centuries promised but never delivered. So even though the ideas of Anarchism are fundamentally different from those of Nationalism it is still possible to learn from nationalist movements by studying the working class elements of those movements that demanded more than the bourgeoisie leadership was willing or able to deliver.