A View North 1900 and after: predicting the unpredictable

By Jack Holland

In 1900, the Irish literary landscape would lose its best and most famous talent, Oscar Wilde, who would be dead before the year’s end.

Wilde belonged to a very different world to that which was about to come.

He was a 19th century figure, an upper-class bohemian, a dandy of the Victorian literary salon, able to outrage "respectable" society with such ease that he was lulled into underestimating the extent of the prejudice that lurked there, ready to destroy him, which task it had almost completed by the time the new century had dawned.

One wonders what Wilde would have made of what followed? Though he was very much of his century, he discerned something of the factors that would shape the next but was mistaken completely as to how they would do so. In his pamphlet "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," he was actually optimistic. He believed socialism would liberate human beings from drudgery so that they could devote their energies to art.

Such a generous, civilized soul as Wilde’s could not imagine the horrors of collectivism and totalitarianism that would become characteristics of large parts of the world within three decades of his death. Those were very much 20th century phenomena, and almost totally unforeseen by anybody who was alive in 1900. As the 19th century ended, Emile Zola did warn that the prevalent anti-Semitism would lead to a holocaust and Jack London’s novel "The Iron Heel" in 1907 did presage something of the nature of fascism. But they were very much the exception. In Ireland, as elsewhere in Western Europe and the U.S., things for the most seemed to be going innocently along in their old 19th century way. The Celtic Twilight mood was still in vogue. Lyric was king. A.E. Houseman’s nostalgic vision of a lost rural world, "The Shropshire Lad," was a poetry best seller. The Somme, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Treblinka and Hiroshima were names merely of places, for the most part obscure.

Outside of Western Europe, many people were chaffing under imperial rule, but in Ireland no one could have predicted that within two decades a bloody war would be fought that would see men being executed without trial, neighbor murdering neighbor, and civil and sectarian war engulfing large parts of the country. The "experts" or their contemporary equivalents did not get it right. Indeed, one best-selling book of the time, "The Great Illusion," by Norman Angell, confidently predicted that in the future European wars would be either impossible or destined to be of brief duration because of the interconnectedness of the banking system. The book was published in 1910, four years before the beginning of the Great War, which would exceed in scale and devastation any war which had gone before it.

Ireland in 1900 was perhaps more immune from the currents that were shaping the future than was the rest of Europe. However no one — whether French, German, Italian, English or Irish — could have imagined the nightmare that lay ahead, just a few years away. What would Wilde have thought, for instance, if someone had come to him at the dawn of 1900 and said that within three decades slavery would have been reintroduced into a major European democracy? He would have probably concluded that the person who made such a prediction was mad. And yet it came about. The opening of the first Nazi labor camp took place in 1933.

Ireland remained immune from the worst horrors of the century, though it could not fail to be affected by events. Thousands of Irish men died in the slaughterhouse that was the Great War. It affected Ireland is another way — presenting the leaders of militant Irish nationalism with an opportunity to rebel. The subsequent struggle for Irish self-determination cost the country dearly in the 1920s. The unresolved questions of Irish nationalism came back to haunt the country in 1969.

This century was the second time in Ireland’s history that its relative isolation protected it from the worst ravages of the time. The first was in the 5th century AD, when Roman — and Classical — civilization collapsed and intellectual darkness descended on nearly all of Europe. As it would be 1,500 years later, Ireland was spared the barbarism and chaos that almost succeeded in wiping out civil society.

That is, the last century confirmed in many ways Ireland’s odd situation in relation to the rest of Europe. It was a European nation yet a "colony" of sorts of an empire. It was one of the only Western European peoples to suffer the scourge of imperialism rather than inflict it. In many ways, while linguistically, culturally and racially tied to the imperial body, Ireland was still fiercely separate and distinguished by a definite identity, which in the early 1900s it was in the process of redefining. This task it continued to pursue for the rest of the century.

An important part of that identify had to do with the struggle for nationhood. The 20th century saw that struggle go through a cycle, from armed conflict to constitutional politics, back to armed conflict, only to once more return to the political "unarmed" option. The cycle repeated itself three times between 1916 and 1997.

As the new century begins many people might speculate as to the probability of the cycle repeating itself in the not-to-distant future, in spite of the fact that current developments would make such a return seem most unlikely. The point of this column, after all, has been to argue that the 20th century has turned out in ways that were almost totally unpredicted — and maybe unpredictable — when it began. Could we be deceived by the successes of the current peace process into thinking that the "war" is over for good?

I for one would be greatly surprised if there was a return to widespread violence in Ireland in this century. The empire is gone. Ireland has achieved a measure of self-rule, and strengthened its position in the world, regularizing its relationship with Britain. Sectarian tensions remain in the North, of course, and no doubt will for the foreseeable future, which means violence will remain a threat. But the motivation is not there among any significant group or section of the community to sustain another campaign of political violence. The paramilitaries are merging into the broader political spectrum, at least for the foreseeable future. The circumstances that would reverse that and lead to a recrudescence of violence are unlikely to occur.