The Irish Century (4)

The Unreconciled
The unfolding of the twentieth century was a transition from a catclysmic war to a worse war. The First World War created two contrary senses - that this must be the last war or that this wasted war must be repaired by a good war. Thus the century went from violence to violence and threw aside its pacifists

The First World War deepened the sense of the twentieth century as, at the same time, an age of hope and an age of exhaustion. "The century is haunted by a non-dialectical relationship between necessity and will".(P.31) Violence - the violence so characteristic of the century - marks the points where the dialectical conjunction might have been. In this century, these unreconciled opposites would not be endured. They would be violently reconciled, irrespective of the cost, or at least unaware of it.

As we look back on nationalist Ireland today, we do so from within a new restoration, similar to the restoration of the bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. This new restoration is, again, marked by the apparent triumph of resignation towards necessity. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the USSR, the withering of Chinese communism, the eclipse of the European Communist parties, the weakening of trade unions everywhere, all constitute parts of the long failure of the Russian Revolution and the restoration of the pre-World War One society of internationally mobile capital.

After that century, this has become a world in which it would cost as much to feed the whole planet as Euopeans and North American's spend on perfume; but this fact seems without immanent consequence. After that century, Ireland has become a country which seems, in GDP terms, one of the richest in the world and seems to have left behind the past which made it so. The European resignation and the Irish enrichment mean that the distance between Ireland and its European environment is marked, less and less, by the counterposition of the nationalist martyr and the modernist killer which once seemed to mark Ireland apart. The history of Irish participation in the First World War, a point of shame for nationalist Ireland, has become a mere gap in historiography to be filled and reaffirmed in walking tours of World War One graveyards in Belgium and Northern France. The restoration of pre-WW1 Europe and the invention of post-colonial Ireland create a meeting of minds such that European culture now empowers the Irish businessman, rather than comforting the closet Irish intellectual.