Dead and gone: Europe changing as rapidly now as it did in 1916

APRIL FOOL’S and Spy Wednesday fall together today, as bedfellows. Last night, the Taoiseach outlined the Ireland 2016 centenary programme in the riding school in Dublin’s Collins Barracks.

Dead and gone: Europe changing as rapidly now as it did in 1916

Next Monday, President Michael D Higgins will stand outside the GPO in O’Connell Street. The proclamation will be read, a wreath will be laid, and the republic that was proclaimed on Easter Monday, 1916, will enter into its 100th year.

Fools and traitors are a trope of our republic. Some took the boat, others took pieces of silver. More were fooled. Padraig Pearse, who gloried in being a fool of sorts, proclaimed the republic. His retort to the world was:

Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;

A fool that hath loved his folly,

Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,

Or their fame in men’s mouth.

It may be regrettable, but this country was not founded by people standing in a circle singing ‘Kumbaya’.

It is appropriate that the signatories of the proclamation are being brought centre-stage. They are an antidote to the corrosiveness of cynicism, and of the hurling on the ditch that drains nearly everything away.

They were great failures, but while posthumously they had many followers, they had few imitators.

It is good that they will be remembered solemnly. The Government is right to avoid an excess of post-modern relativism.

For good and bad, there was only one rising, and one proclamation, signed by seven iconic signatories.

Because we lack a shared purpose of what the republic is about, it is all the more important that its founders are honoured.

The act of commemoration is a kind of magic to evoke a tradition, but a tradition that is only alive via the invocation. Thus, what appears only as empty ritual is a deeply necessary social identity.

One plan for the centenary year, the ritualising of patriotism, is to distribute the national flag to every school, and explain again its symbolism and history.

This is for the good. It is important that the language of symbols is understood and that the significance of history is reinforced.

The tricolour, of course, never achieved the union of orange and green.

US vice-president Joe Biden’s jocose remark, on Saint Patrick’s Day, that “if you’re wearing orange, you’re not welcome here”, may have been in bad taste, but it was also a truth of sorts.

The achievement of commemoration, since its reinstatement on the 90th anniversary of the rising, in 2006, is that our uncomfortable truths can be marked, and not avoided.

Then, for the first time in decades, the anniversary was marked by the State.

Mutual respect does not require a dilution of history to the point of inanity. The rising then, and its commemoration now, are both deeply influenced by their international context.

Arguably, parliamentary democracy had failed in Ireland as far back as the Charles Stuart Parnell split. It certainly ended any dalliance between Irish nationalism and pluralism.

It is hindsight now, but the quarter century between the split and the rising saw an aging Irish Party increasingly engaged in London, but disengaged from the change of generation and of culture at home.

The Gaelic revival, and the rise of militant nationalism, left a group of old men adrift when rupture arrived.

Formed in the 19th century, trying and ultimately failing to create an Edwardian entente, the Irish Party was singularly ill-prepared for either the technological revolution or the politics of the 20th century.

The First World War was the appalling exemplar of technological revolution. Mechanised war, like militant nationalism, was a force old dynastic elites could not control.

Do school children know who Hapsburgs, Romanovs or Hohenzollerns were? Obsolete now, they appeared all-powerful then.

In an apparent instant, a once-immutable old order collapsed. The rising was part of that moment; it was of its time.

The scale of change is arguably as profound now. Technology again is central to rupture. We should be aware of the irony that we are celebrating the nation state at the moment it has become obsolete, in the form it was conceived.

In Ireland, there is the added irony that nation, state, and national territory have never been in sync.

But the bigger picture is that the decade we are commemorating, of which the rising is the focal point, witnessed the replacement of vast multi-national European empires with nation states.

That shift created as much oppression for those caught on the wrong side of borders, and of history, as it did liberation.

One hundred years later, coping with the consequences of politics and war, and more recently of globalisation, the same nation states are cleaving together as a multinational European Union.

Sixty four years ago, the initial impulse for founding the European Coal and Steel Community was to keep the peace. Now, the scale of globalisation is such that it is inconceivable that small nation states could survive without pooling sovereignty and power.

New empires have replaced old ones. Global corporations are the new Colossus. Only multilateralism, on the scale and extent of the European Union, seems capable of protecting small countries in a globalised economy — at a price.

The price is the transfer of power. The reality of citizenship is doubly changed, first by technological rupture and the reaction to it. Anyone with a Facebook page or a Twitter account has a global platform.

Established intermediaries — national elites — in media and politics are diminished and apparently caught unprepared. But their world is irrevocably changed.

The citizen is increasingly automated by new technology platforms, but disconnected from established political processes because of it.

The state, seeking the inclusive participation of its citizens, is increasingly arbitrated, not within its own institutions but in multinational ones, from which the same citizen feels extraordinarily distant.

Technology is allowing instant access to almost everything, while driving a great flattening of old hierarchies globally. Simultaneously, it is creating new ones, unamenable to old restrictions.

Once new nation states, but old countries now, we regroup within vast multinational structures for institutional protection. Once Irish leaders travelled endlessly to London, now they trip to Brussels.

The centenary of the rising eerily echoes the event. It is a time of profound dislocation, of shifting of power and of crumbling of old elites, or at least of old structures.

That’s the odd thing about commemoration. It solidifies, in illusionary permanency, what is already rapidly changing.

The great opportunity of the centenary is to remember the past, so we can better understand the present.

The republic proclaimed at Easter, 1916, was in fact never established and what was established is already passing before our very eyes.

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