| Popis: |
Irish nationalists and the British government each sought analogies from world history to contextualize Ireland’s partition. The British alternated between arguing that Ireland contained two nations that could only be brought together under Britain’s aegis and claiming that the United Kingdom was a single nation that Irish nationalists were trying to sunder using the methods of the American Confederacy. Irish nationalists rejected such comparisons and instead sought procedural guidance in some of the Versailles plebiscites, particularly one in Upper Silesia. At the outset of the Irish revolution, references to the international context of partition focused on whether Ireland was a single nation entitled to self-determination. By the time the Boundary Commission actually met, that idealistic rhetoric had faded, replaced by limited invocations of legal precedent regarding the Versailles plebiscites. Studying the partition issue in this context demonstrates the rise and fall of Wilsonianism as well as the Irish transition from heady revolutionary days to the more quotidian aspects of post-revolutionary governance. It also demonstrates the new global frameworks in which the Irish Free State moved, as prior to independence most analogies offered for Ireland were to places within the British Empire, while by the mid-1920s such analogies invoked other European regions. |
