The Breakdown of Settler Rule

The demise of Protestant rule in Northern Ireland and of white rule in Rhodesia illustrates the importance of maintaining the settler state's autonomy from metropolitan interference, control over the native population, and settler solidarity on fundamental principles and the means to defend them.

Settlers in Rhodesia and Northern Ireland grew uneasy when incumbent regimes began to experiment with native accommodation. Prime Ministers Sir Edgar Whitehead and Terence O'Neill made unprecedented conciliatory gestures toward their respective subordinate populations. For Rhodesian blacks and Ulster Catholics, the reforms sparked a revolution of rising expectations that could not, alas, be satisfied by regimes dependent on right-wing settlers for survival in office. The majority of the Rhodesian and Ulster settlers were not prepared to countenance even a limited reformist solution, convinced that concessions would inspire more radical demands from the natives and that re-

forms violated their cherished values and the state's raison d'être. Each regime's experiment with reform, therefore, quickly depleted the reservoir of consent within the dominant caste. In some other settler states—Liberia before 1980, contemporary Taiwan, and even South Africa—modernizing elites have had somewhat more success in mobilizing settler support for concessions, but not without resistance from reactionary forces.

Both the O'Neill and Whitehead Governments represented relatively enlightened sections of the respective settler castes. Paradoxically, these regimes were attempting not to dismantle but to strengthen and refine settler domination by partially accommodating and hence placating the native caste. Hegemonic or ascendant settler factions, however, could see no advantages in streamlined settler rule. Each maverick government's disturbance of traditional political norms and its innovations in intercommunal relations provoked intense resistance from the ultraconservative elements of the dominant community as well as hard-line elements in the state, whose confidence in the ruling elite had irreversibly shattered. They accused both Whitehead and O'Neill of forsaking the sacrosanct principle of settler supremacy by encouraging accommodation—however limited—with blacks or Catholics. Concessions of any kind were defined as a prelude to the specter of "black domination" in Rhodesia and "Rome rule" or "Catholic domination" in a reunited Ireland. In both societies, the pendulum swung back "towards those who [were] least ready for change"; and each moderate regime succumbed to an absolutist and recalcitrant one.^[1] In both, the former enlightened state managers and their supporters lacked the resources and the will to oppose the retrograde direction of the new regime. After attempting to stage electoral comebacks, the modernists grew increasingly marginalized and finally vanished from the political scene. Our two cases thus support Leo Kuper's thesis that the "failure of reformism" is a powerful tendency, if not a "law," in settler states.^[2]

In Ulster, the removal of Terence O'Neill and the installation of a more conservative Unionist Government further mobilized and radicalized the subordinate population. British and Catholic pressures combined to fragment and generate a violent backlash among Protestants and a crisis for the regime. O'Neill's successor, James Chichester-Clark,

[1] Colin Leys, European Politics in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 36.

[2] Leo Kuper, The Pity of It All: Polarization of Racial and Ethnic Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

lasted slightly more than a year and gave way to the more hard-line Brian Faulkner. Although the Conservative Government in London allowed the settlers greater leeway from 1970 to 1972 than had the previous Labour Government, the metropole's continued interference in domestic affairs proved disastrous for the Unionist state. The last three settler regimes had little latitude in decision making. Each had simultaneously to play to the British gallery, appease right-wing critics, and appear sensitive to the demands of the Catholic minority. The escalation of mass street protests and political violence, police and military brutality, and the disarray of three successive Unionist cabinets created a full-scale crisis of order and stability by early 1972. Realizing that Unionist rule was no longer tenable, London assumed direct control of the state machinery.

Compared to Rhodesia from 1958 through 1962, Ulster experienced more widespread mobilization of the subordinate population; the overstretched security system was less able to curtail popular protest and sectarian violence; and divisions within the settler community grew deeper and less amenable to resolution. In Rhodesia, the security system was able to suppress African nationalism in the 1960s, and a new settler government was remarkably successful in reunifying the settler caste.

Immediately after its installation in 1962, the Rhodesian Front reneged on the concessions granted by its predecessor. The intransigence of the settlers over even minor adjustments in the apartheid system crystallized in 1965 when Ian Smith defiantly announced Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain. The black majority saw UDI as the final nail in the coffin for their aspirations. Hitherto blacks had looked to Britain to redress their grievances, but metropolitan impotence and the settler state's sweeping legal restrictions on peaceful opposition drove their campaign underground and led to a protracted armed struggle.

Effective autonomy from the metropole is an essential condition for stable settler rule. Britain's distinctive relations to Rhodesia and Ulster helped shape the trajectory of change in each. In neither case did the Crown relish the thought of direct intervention. As a former British Home Secretary, James Callaghan, wrote with Ulster and Cyprus in mind, "how easy it was to get into such a situation and how difficult to get out."^[3] The ideal scenario for the metropole—the least costly or entangling—was to orchestrate political change by remote control.

[3] James Callaghan, A House Divided: The Dilemma of Northern Ireland (London: Collins, 1973), p. 60.

Hence it applied diplomatic and economic pressure on the rebel Rhodesian regime and persevered for three years in its efforts to wring reforms out of the Unionist regimes.

If the British Government sought to avoid direct political and military intervention in Rhodesia and Northern Ireland, its capacity to intervene was radically different in each setting. As part (however ambiguous) of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland was susceptible to British intervention politically, geographically, militarily, and economically; Rhodesia was not. Rhodesia's unilateral cutting of ties to Britain in 1965 gave the settlers precisely the room for maneuver that their Ulster counterparts lacked. It took the Crown quite some time to realize that Rhodesia was a uniquely incorrigible colony over which metropolitan jurisdiction and leverage were fictions. Unlike other colonies with settler populations (Kenya, Zambia, Zanzibar), Rhodesia was almost entirely outside London's sphere of influence. That it withstood fifteen years of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressures was a measure of its insulation from other international actors as well.

It is significant that an Ulster Unionist regime itself requested metropolitan military assistance in 1969 to restore public order. The settler regime attempted to forge an alliance with these troops that, as in Algeria in the 1950s, was no substitute for absolute control over the military. Britain's military support had a high price, as Kenya's settlers learned after the Mau Mau crisis. With military and administrative personnel stationed in Ulster, Britain realized the folly of working through established institutions and the need for entirely new arrangements. (It had no such "hands-on" experience in Rhodesia before 1979.)

The juridical basis for British intervention in Northern Ireland was relatively clear (whereas in Rhodesia metropolitan authority was problematic, particularly after UDI in 1965). London's residual sovereignty over Northern Ireland (as part of the United Kingdom) meant that it required no constitutional engineering or negotiated settlement before establishing direct rule. Unlike Rhodesia in 1979, Ulster had no viable alternative government waiting in the wings. Each of the last three Unionist regimes had diminishing authority, and a domestic alternative to Unionist rule—for example, power sharing—was not yet on the agenda. The absence of an internal solution and the poor three-year record of filtering reforms through Protestant regimes suggested that transforming this settler state would require direct metropolitan engineering.

In Zimbabwe, by contrast, London had strong incentives to tread lightly on the existing political and security system. In addition to the

considerations outlined above and given Britain's entanglement in Ulster, the metropole hesitated to embark on a state-building experiment in Zimbabwe, which might turn into another long-term imbroglio.^[4] Britain's chief concern was to arrive at a settlement and rid itself of the Rhodesian burden; the substance of the settlement was secondary provided it include provision for free elections.

Our findings show that each pillar of settler rule is absolutely vital to state survival. When one condition fails—as in Rhodesia with the sharp rise of native insurgency during the 1970s—settler rule is doomed. However, the fact that Rhodesia continued to enjoy high levels of settler solidarity and autonomy from the metropole delayed the inevitable collapse of the settler state for the greater part of a decade. When all three pillars crack—as in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1972—dissolution of the settler order is likely to accelerate. In Ulster, the state fell apart rather quickly under metropolitan political pressure and military intervention, the unraveling of settler unity, and the activation of the subordinate population.