Nationalism and Independence: Selected Irish Papers by Nicholas Mansergh, ed. Diana Mansergh, Cork, 264pp, £45/£14.95 This is an indispensable collection of essays, papers, diary entries, and notes of interviews by Nicholas Mansergh (1910-91), of Grenane, County Tipperary and St John's, Cambridge, pre-eminent historian of the British Commonwealth and of the foundation of the Irish state.
Its chief concern is with imperial disengagement, in Ireland and India. On the period 1911-22 in Ireland, there is considerable overlap, which, deliberately wrought by the editor, Mansergh's wife and collaborator Diana, is a triumph of intelligent collation. The result is not repetitive, but rather unfolds Mansergh's patient elucidation of political choices and their consequences.
Most historians, perhaps most writers, have one or at most a handful of ideas or perceptions which they explore and reformulate, vary and revise, knead and stretch. In Mansergh's case, the governing idea relates to the "triangular political context" of imperial withdrawal from divided societies as in Ireland and India:
At the time of partition both countries were within a single polity, the British imperial system, and in each case the partition took place coincidentally in time with a transfer of power, albeit limited in the Irish case, to indigenous authorities . . . In a triangular pretransfer of power situation there is, all affinities supposed or actual apart, a tendency for the second and third parties, the minority and the outgoing imperial power, to be drawn together in resistance to the demands of the first, the majority Nationalist party. Indeed it is close to a law of politics.
Mansergh's writing is fastidious and arresting. He is too sensitive a historian to accept the cruder variants of doctrines of "objective" inevitability in politics, and too tough-minded to subscribe to wistful elegies of nationalist betrayal. Mansergh's breadth of imaginative sympathy is exceptionally large. His personal sympathies are evidently on the nationalist side, and some of the creative tension of his writing comes from the fact that his chief preoccupation is with the British rather than the Irish nationalist perspective on events. He is alive to the paradox of disengagement: that the reach of the imperial power, measured in terms of its ability to mould the successor regime, and its effect on later generations, is at its greatest at the moment of withdrawal.
The single quality that most distinguishes Mansergh as a historian is his ability to keep simultaneously in view the immediate political constraints under which most notably Lloyd George was operating, and the awesome and unfathomable consequences of the decisions taken. It is rare for a writer on high politics to have such a sensitivity to its repercussions for those who had to live with the consequences.
He is ruefully aware of the manner in which British policy-makers saw themselves as shutting down the Irish question in its classic late 19th-century form (which was perhaps already obsolete), without fully addressing the new Irish question which they were thereby calling into being. He subverts the premise of the old quip that whenever the British solved the Irish question, the Irish changed the question.
The settlement would, it was hoped, bring to an end the cycle of policy which began with Parnell, and remove the disruptive play of the Irish question at the heart of British politics. Liberals and Conservatives, for quite different reasons, had a common interest in sloughing off the legacies of Gladstone and Salisbury respectively, and to unpinion themselves from the crux on which Parnell had impaled them.
In his essay on the Unionist Party and the Union, written while Labour was in power in Britain, Mansergh saw its experience over Ireland as part of the education of the Conservative party in modern politics:
If it be true that Unionist fundamentalism, lending countenance to threats and preparations for armed resistance in Ulster to Home Rule in the years before the First World War, bore a heavy, possibly a decisive, responsibility for creating a situation in which a violent resolution of the Irish question became probable, it has also to be remarked that with the qualified exception of Cyprus, the party, still dominant in English life till the early sixties [sic], was not again immobilized by credal conviction on a nationalist issue on `the wrong side of history'.
While his view is rigorously unsentimental and he refuses to engage in counterfactual arguments as to what might have occurred, he minutely explains how the paradigm of the emerging settlement shifted adversely to Northern nationalists (who were nevertheless to be stoically and poignantly protreaty), and how the foundation of the Northern Ireland state was at once the least anticipated and least preferred of outcomes.
Dr Margaret O'Callaghan has written of Mansergh's sensitivity to "the tragedies of the neat separation of apparently irreconcilable positions", and of the great loss of Mansergh's "clear unflinching gaze . . . at a crucial and difficult time". She was rightly asserting that the loss is political as well as historical.
Mansergh took immense pains to make clear that even in the most intractable and unpromising political terrain, political outcomes are not entirely predetermined. He conveys a sense of how the possibilities for forward movement exist at the margin, in the slender strip of ground which separates opposing blocs, if policymakers have the imagination and resolve to seize them. If his work on the Irish settlement carried an implied charge of lack of foresightedness on the part of the chief actors on the British side, it represents equally an implicit rebuke to the calamitous pursuit of a "last heave" for unity which, in infinite variations, for so long informed the policy of the Irish state in regard to Northern Ireland, and to some extent continues to do so, if no longer in an altogether conscious way.
Frank Callanan's latest book is a biography of Parnell