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That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War
That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War
Clair Wills
Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2007
512 pp., 39.00

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Ronald A. Wells


The Emergency

Ireland's neutrality during World War II

World War II was the last "good" war, or so many people believe. Looking back now, through the lenses of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, that war was the last time "the free world" could go forward unambiguously to confront an evil foe. Can there really be a doubt that a German-led Axis victory would have been a severe, if not fatal, blow to liberal democracy? While the Anglo-American-led Allies were not perfect democrats (ask Mr. Gandhi about that), their effort to stop international fascism was the right thing to do.

How could a Western European nation remain "neutral" when so much was at stake? One can accept little Belgium opting out, in view of geography and of its terrible experience in World War I. But Ireland? How could Ireland stand by, not taking sides, saying this wasn't its fight, when so much was on the line? For people in Britain and America, whose histories are intertwined with Ireland, these are a confounding set of questions. Clair Wills intends to probe these questions and analyze North Atlantic society while focusing this outstanding book on Ireland.

Wills is a professor of literature at one of the colleges of the University of London. Her previous work on literary theory and on the social meaning of Northern Irish poetry suggests the range and depth of her scholarship, and her preparation for this book. She also has a personal stake in this exploration: her mother grew up during the war on a farm in rural Ireland; her father grew up at the same time in the London area. That sensibility serves the author well. At several critical moments in the story, the reader benefits from Wills' intuitive grasp of thought and feeling on both sides of the Irish Sea.

A note on method is necessary. We need to ask how it is that a literary scholar writes a history of Ireland's neutrality in wartime. Wills' scholarship ranges broadly, from Irish and British parliamentary debates to dispatches from diplomats to reports from intelligence services. But her main sources for explicating this extraordinary period are the writers of the period. This is an important choice by the author, and this reader grants the premise. Wills writes, "Because Irish intellectual life lacked a tradition of political theory or sociology, literature had taken on responsibility for recording Irish life, and in particular for investigating the clashing moralities and value systems in Irish society." In short, with no Irish equivalent of Max Weber, Abraham Kuyper, R.H. Tawney, or Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ireland looked to its literary élite. In an earlier generation it was Shaw, Yeats, and O'Casey. In the Depression and war years it was Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Faolain, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Louis MacNeice. In a short review like this one cannot begin to do justice to the insightful ways the author uses various literary genres to illumine the Irish mind and heart. But a careful reader of Wills' outstanding achievement will see how effectively she has utilized these sources. I was particularly taken with the work of Kate O'Brien and Elizabeth Bowen.

For readers a bit vague about recent Irish history, herewith a few key dates. When the war started in Europe in 1939 (not 1941 as it did here), it had only been 23 years since the Easter Rising of 1916; further, 1939 was only 18 years since the establishment of the state. A bloody civil war raged in the early 1920s, pitting those who crafted the expedient partition of Ireland against those who bitterly opposed the treaty that enabled it. Therefore, when Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Éamon de Valera stood up in the Parliament (the Dáil) in Ireland's (Éire's) capital of Dublin, he realized what a fragile nation he headed. As Sean O'Casey remarked during World War II, "Ireland is the oldest country in Europe, though she is still in her teens." For de Valera, the decision to remain neutral was pragmatic. As one of his cabinet ministers said, before Ireland could have entered the war, it would have had to fight a civil war to determine which side to join. In truth, many Irish citizens distrusted Britain so thoroughly, they wondered if Éire wouldn't be better off with a German victory—or at least, as one newspaper editor wrote, the Irish hoped that Britain would nearly lose the war. At the same time, there was a sizable minority which saw Britain's historic stand for democracy as worthy of Irish support.

The Taoiseach insisted on the right of small nations to stay out of conflicts begun by powerful nations. His view—suggested by the Irish government's term for the wartime period, "the Emergency"—combined a desire to be an honest broker between powerful combatants with the realization that an early Irish entry into the war would likely threaten the stability, perhaps the very existence, of the Irish state. Even if understandable, it was a policy hard to defend to the British and Americans, especially in the early stages of the war, when it seemed like Germany might actually win. Britain was going it alone; the United States was still isolationist; France had fallen; Russia was not yet an ally. Britain's slim lifelines were the shipping routes to North America, and protecting those routes around Ireland was vital. The losses in the British merchant marine to German U-boats were high. But de Valera would not allow Britain to use Irish ports to outfit and fuel its ships to protect the convoys. This undoubtedly caused a greater loss of life and a further threat to Britain, battling fascism virtually alone. Roosevelt and Churchill were very critical of the Taoiseach, but he wouldn't back down, both because he thought neutrality was morally right and because he had the support of the Irish people.

But the people's support was strained by de Valera's draconian policy of censorship. He not only wanted Ireland neutral as a matter of policy, he wanted to deny Irish citizens the information they would need if they were going to take sides. While a good deal of the news about the war available elsewhere in Europe and in America tilted toward propaganda—the British were masters of the half-truth—six years of censorship damaged Irish society much more than de Valera was willing to concede. Wills is at her best in discussing the full extent of censorship. Depriving the Irish people of basic knowledge about the great events of their time did not prepare them for participation in modern European society after the war. De Valera had not anticipated this. But even if he had, it wouldn't have bothered him much: the Ireland he envisioned was decidedly pre-modern, a society based on agriculture and small towns, buttressed by an ultra-montane Catholicism. Instead, neutrality and censorship induced a moral numbness, a condition that persisted after the war.

One of Wills' main triumphs in the book is a convincing portrayal of the way in which de Valera and his ideological colleagues tried to invoke the tradition of Catholic social teaching in organizing Irish society. Books & Culture readers are likely to be particularly interested in this section, because the author makes credible de Valera's contention that neutrality had a spiritual core. Many people in Ireland wanted to build a Christian state, and that meant rejecting the excesses of liberal capitalism and especially social and economic individualism. This Irish Catholic vision for society was corporatist and hierarchical, and was indeed illiberal. Some in Britain and American saw an affinity for fascism in all this, but Wills argues that it would be a mistake to understand Irish desires to build a Christian society in those terms.

When the horror of German atrocities came to light as the concentration camps were liberated in 1945, there was renewed criticism of Ireland's supposedly "spiritual" neutrality. In short, the Anglo-American questions to Ireland went like this: "is the world disclosed at Nuremberg one on which you wanted to make no comment or show no commitment about?" Clair Wills is admirably judicious and fair in insisting that Ireland's peculiar history of domination by Britain and its sincerely held Catholicism did indeed put it on a different track from either Britain or Germany. Yet she also acknowledges the painful irony that Ireland today remains profoundly indebted to Britain's struggle against fascism and victory for democratic capitalism, won at great cost.

While this splendid book has a very appealing 30-page bibliographical essay, the author and her editor made what I think to be a poor choice—there are no footnotes or internal citations. In several important places in the text that I would have liked to follow up, there is no note or citation. I can't understand that. It does mar an otherwise distinguished effort. Still, this well-researched and well-written book will repay close reading from all who are interested in Britain and Ireland and those who ask questions about public morality in wartime.

Ronald A. Wells is professor of history, emeritus, Calvin College in Michigan, and is now director of the Maryville Symposium: Conversations on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College in Tennessee. His recent books on peacemaking in Northern Ireland are People Behind the Peace: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Eerdmans), and Friendship Towards Peace: The Journey of Ken Newell and Gerry Reynolds (Columba).

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