Private Irelands: The legacies of the Anglo-Irish War in interwar England

The Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21 and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 were profoundly unsettling events which, coming hard on the heels of World War I and in the context of general imperial unrest, had the capacity to endanger the renowned stability of interwar England. Troubled political relations and uncertain compromises over matters such as passports, the boundary between Northern Ireland and the Free State, and the autonomy of dominions in general seemed to foreshadow Britain's rocky imperial future. At home, the presence of a significant and, by the 1930s, growing Irish minority could have raised the specter of a dissident ethnic politics that might have forced a reckoning with legacies of prejudice and discrimination. Instead, there occurred in England an incomplete process of making Ireland foreign and, most importantly, a method of privatization that ensured that what could not be disentangled could be contained and absorbed. Interwar England was defined as insular, domestic, and stable, and this was achieved in part by sweeping potentially unsettling manifestations of the Irish connection into the realm of the private and the personal. In that depoliticized realm, the values of 'muddling through' and indeterminacy held sway, and Irishness became a personal matter: a hobby, an enthusiasm, a heritage, maybe even an obsession, but no longer a viable political subject position. Thus, for example, the Labour Party refused to contemplate a specifically Irish constituency, insisting that ethnic identity was a private issue. The political mobilization of Irish immigrants during the Anglo-Irish War petered out into social clubs and cultural endeavors. And Ireland itself transformed, for English visitors, from a battleground back into a beauty spot, with the rise of an increasingly commercial tourist industry. Ultimately, this process of privatization underpinned the construction of the interwar ideal of English self-sufficiency and stability. It did not simply exclude undesirables from the nation; instead, it served to contain and render harmless, or even attractive, the undesirable characteristics within most individuals. Finally, its characteristic patterns of partial amnesia and limited assimilation suggest the limits of Britain's repertoire of responses to post-1945 decolonization and immigration.