Securing Independence from London

In 1889 London granted Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company (BSAC) a charter to occupy, exploit, and govern what became Southern Rhodesia. The settlement of the area was part of a British strategy to establish a territorial counterbalance to the regional claims of Germany, Portugal, and South Africa. In this instance, rather than direct involvement Britain preferred absentee expansion through its BSAC proxy, because it simultaneously extended Britain's sphere of influence in Africa and avoided the expense of formal colonization.^[1]

[1] Claire Palley, The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 24–26.

Britain retained nominal jurisdiction over the territory, including the power to revoke the company's charter; behind this facade, the BSAC exercised de facto control over the territory. London was prepared to assert itself only "if Company action was likely either to result in diplomatic difficulties, to involve Britain with powerful chiefs, to involve exploitation of the British name, or to occasion adverse parliamentary or press comment"^[2] In practice, intervention was rare and the company enjoyed extraordinary quasi-state autonomy and latitude from 1890 to 1896.^[3]

Conflicts over land and labor provided the initial source of hostilities between settlers and natives. For the blacks (or "Africans"), company rule meant summary land expropriation, forced labor, and physical abuse.^[4] In reaction to this mistreatment a massive African revolt broke out in 1896–1897. The rebellion was of such magnitude—10 percent of the settler population died—that London could no longer turn a blind eye to the colony's race relations. A Legislative Council was introduced wherein power was divided between representatives of the company, the settler community, and a British commissioner.

Britain's slightly increased involvement after the rebellion was designed to mitigate the oppressiveness of BSAC rule; yet the metropole avoided drastic steps such as abolishing the company's charter, because it was unwilling to assume the financial burden that such action would require.^[5]

Although the British South Africa Company retained control over internal affairs, its position was eroding as British involvement rose and the settler community grew bolder in asserting its interests against BSAC power.^[6] Discontent mounted over disputed mining claims and over the company's expropriation of unalienated land, and the settlers began to press for the replacement of the charter with devolved government. The center of political gravity shifted from the company to the settlers in 1922, when settlers voted in a referendum for devolved government rather than incorporation into the Union of South Africa.^[7] Southern

[2] Ibid., pp. 42–43.

[3] Lewis Gann, A History of Southern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1934 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p. 208; Palley, Constitutional History, p. 100; Robin Palmer, Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 25.

[4] Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

[5] Palley, Constitutional History, p. 129.

[6] Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia: 1896–1897 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 336.

[7] Because of franchise limitations, the African voice was not heard in this election. Only 60 of the 18,810 voters were African (James Mutambirwa, The Rise of Settler Power in Southern Rhodesia, 1898–1923 [Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1980], p. 217).

Rhodesia officially became a "self-governing colony" in 1923. (Hereafter, references to Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia are interchangeable; Northern Rhodesia, which became independent Zambia in 1964, was a separate colony.)

London retained sovereign authority over the territory, but Rhodesia enjoyed virtual dominion status.^[8] Britain retained "reserved powers" over native affairs and foreign relations but almost never vetoed legislation passed by Rhodesia's all-white Legislative Assembly.^[9] Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins boasted in July 1951 that "the British Government know that in practice the reservations are not worth the paper they are written on"^[10] Unlike other British colonies—including those with sizable settler populations like Kenya, Zanzibar, and Northern Rhodesia—Rhodesia was not subject to the administrative or military authority of the British Colonial Office (a resident governor performed largely ceremonial duties). By 1923 the settlers had at their disposal both the political and coercive levers of state power. In achieving de facto autonomy from Britain, Rhodesia mastered the first imperative of a settler state.

Northern Ireland is often depicted as the scene of a deep-rooted, if archaic, religious conflict. But religion is only part of the problem. Civil strife tends to occur along religious lines, but the essence of the conflict lies in the distribution of political power, disputes over national identity, and the constitutional status of the territory. Northern Ireland contains "two nations" with diametrically opposed national identities, Irish and British, which render the survival and integrity of the state problematic. In this it is like Israel and Taiwan but unlike Rhodesia and South Africa. In both Israel and Northern Ireland, religious cleavages are secondary to, but clearly exacerbate, conflicts on fundamental constitutional and existential questions.

Unlike its Rhodesian counterpart, the Northern Ireland state was forged in the heat of a meltdown of order and authority that accompanied the partition of Ireland in 1920. The Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921 was followed by a civil war in the south in 1922; in the north continuing political violence by the Irish Republican Army was coupled with sectarian attacks between rival groups of Catholics and Protestants. Between

[8] The dominions of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia formally recognized the British monarch as head of state but enjoyed full self-government.

[9] Larry Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia: White Power in an African State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 6–8.

[10] Huggins, quoted in C. Leys and C. Pratt, eds., A New Deal in Central Africa (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 28. Throughout the text I follow British usage in capitalizing Government when I refer to the executive.

June 1920 and June 1922 in Ulster, 428 people were killed and 1,766 wounded.^[11]

After decades of frustration in dealing with unrest and violence in Ireland, Westminster not surprisingly became the prime mover in founding this settler state, whereas in other cases the settlers often took the initiative. Since London wished to extricate itself from its exhausting entanglements in Ireland, it rejected the alternative of direct rule over Ulster.

Before partition, British efforts to grant home rule to all of Ireland (in 1886, 1893, and 1912–1914) were fiercely resisted by Protestants, who feared that home rule would mean "Rome rule"—that is, that Catholic doctrines would become state policy and that the Protestant minority would lose its political and economic privileges. Unlike settlers elsewhere, they campaigned against devolved power, convinced that their paramount interest in remaining outside a Catholic Ireland was best protected under the mantle of full incorporation in the United Kingdom.

Faced with stiff Protestant opposition to home rule, British political elites sought a compromise. In an effort to placate both northern Protestants and southern Catholics, Britain granted home rule or dominion status to the south (the Irish Free State) and devolved separate power to six of the nine northern counties of the province of Ulster (which remained within the United Kingdom). Decades later Britain would find that partition had been a colossal mistake. But before 1921 it seemed the best solution for northern Protestants and southern Catholics alike, just as it promised to free the Crown from its "Irish problem" once and for all. In order to ensure that Protestant preferences would prevail in Northern Ireland, Britain deliberately drew the boundaries in a way that guaranteed a Protestant majority enclave.

After power was devolved on the new northern state in 1921, the Unionists quickly discovered distinct advantages in reducing their vulnerability to the vicissitudes of metropolitan policy shifts. A candid 1936 report by the Ulster Unionist Council revealed its primary fear:

Had we refused to accept a Parliament for Northern Ireland and remained at Westminster, there can be little doubt that now we would either be inside the [Irish] Free State or fighting desperately against incorporation. Northern Ireland without a Parliament of her own would be a standing temptation to cer-

[11] Patrick Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981), p. 46.

tain British politicians to make another bid for a final settlement with the Irish Republic.^[12]

The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 established the constitutional relation between Britain and Northern Ireland whereby Westminster remained the supreme authority. Matters concerning the United Kingdom as a whole—including foreign relations, defense, revenue and taxation, and external trade—were excluded from the powers of the new Ulster parliament. All other matters became the concern of the settler state. The Protestant government had control over the civil service and internal security forces. Under the constitution, defense of the border was a metropolitan responsibility and a small contingent of the British army was garrisoned in the province for this purpose. But the principal instruments of law and order were answerable to the settler regime alone: the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), and the Ministry of Home Affairs. Unlike Britain's conventional unarmed police, Ulster's forces were armed and militarized, almost totally Protestant, and fierce champions of Protestant supremacy. Control over the forces of order put the settlers in much better stead than their counterparts in conventional colonies, where metropolitan-controlled forces handled both internal and external security. London initially armed and financed the Protestant security forces.^[13] The Unionist Government was aware that the British might prove unreliable allies and took steps to ensure that it would not have to depend on them or face London's interference in the future. (Settler groups elsewhere were much slower to take such steps.)

Overt Catholic resistance to the new order was crushed in the early 1920s; thereafter, the minority became rather passive. Yet Catholics, like Israeli Arabs after 1948, remained opposed to the new state and dismissed it as an artificial creation designed to perpetuate domination by a factitious majority. To the respective settlers, therefore, Ulster's Catholics and Israel's Arabs seemed to constitute an "enemy-affiliated minority." Catholic alienation from the northern state,^[14] coupled with the

[12] Report quoted in R. J. Lawrence, The Government of Northern Ireland: Public Finance and Public Services, 1921–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 75.

[13] Michael Farrell, Arming the Protestants: The Formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, 1920–1927 (London: Pluto, 1983), p. 280.

[14] Catholic political parties consistently demanded the dissolution of the northern state and unification of Ireland; Catholics' alienation was widely perceived by Protestant civilians and state officials and is generally accepted by scholars. Unfortunately, there is no representative attitudinal data on perceptions of Catholic "disloyalty" from 1921 to 1972; on attitudes toward Arab "disloyalty" in Israel, see Sammy Smooha, "Jewish and Arab Ethnocentrism in Israel," Ethnic and Racial Studies 10, no. 1 (January 1987): 1–26.

perceived threat from southern Ireland, perpetuated a siege mentality in Unionist quarters and helped justify sectarian discrimination against the minority.^[15] A two-thirds majority in Ulster, the Protestants are a minority in Ireland as a whole (one-fourth of the population) that remains important in light of the Republic of Ireland's constitutional claim of sovereignty over Ulster.^[16] Driven by chronic insecurity, the Protestant regime organized to arrest minority political mobilization, cement the border against an irredentist neighbor, and consolidate settler supremacy in the province. It was not so much a question of whether Catholics were actually plotting or engaged in subversive activity but instead what they might do if given the opportunity, that is, if controls were relaxed. Rather than seek accommodation with the disaffected Catholic community in the wake of the early disturbances, successive Unionist regimes took steps that exacerbated communal divisions and thus reinforced Protestants' sense of insecurity.^[17] The logic was clear: since Catholics were beyond the pale as incorrigible fifth-columnists, any official accommodation would be suicidal for the state.

Catholic opposition to partition and disloyalty to the settler state had unique advantages for the Protestants. MacDonald argues that the continuation of Protestant domination required, and thus encouraged, Catholic disloyalty in order to legitimate settler privileges, amplify the salience of Protestant "loyalty" to Britain, and reproduce class solidarity among Protestants.^[18] Catholic legitimation of the new state might have shattered the arguments justifying the Protestant monopoly of power: that Protestants alone could be trusted by London to maintain order and the union.

Public order and political stability were from the beginning and remain today London's overriding concerns in Northern Ireland. The integrity of the political system and the extent to which Ulster's political culture deviated from British standards were not—until the late 1960s—

[15] The terms Unionist and Loyalist refer generally to the Protestant population, and are often used interchangeably. Unionists sought to maintain the union of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom. Yet their "loyalty" to the British Crown has been contingent on the metropole's perceived defense of Protestant interests; as a 1978 survey found, 85 percent of Protestants stated that a "loyalist is loyal to Ulster before the British government" (Edward Moxon-Browne, Nation, Class, and Creed in Northern Ireland [Aldershot: Gower, 1983], p. 86).

[16] Article 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland reads: "The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland."

[17] David Miller, Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978), p. 139.

[18] Michael MacDonald, Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 22, 24.

serious concerns in the metropole. During the formative years of the new state, Britain did attempt to temper the Unionist Government's largely confrontational approach toward Catholics, but once order had been restored in the early 1920s, metropolitan interest receded. In May 1923 Westminster adopted a convention that Ulster's domestic affairs were not to be discussed in the House of Commons and turned a blind eye to the province's political and internal security arrangements. In this same year Britain devolved political power to the Rhodesian settlers.

Over the next several decades, "the policy ... was to minimise British involvement politically and militarily. Action was taken only where the alternative appeared ultimately to entail a greater degree of involvement."^[19] Britain retained the power to suspend or abolish devolved government in the province, but this ultimate sanction also posed the greatest risk of a backlash and would have required the very involvement that London was concerned to avoid.

Members of Parliament in Westminster showed no interest in the affairs of the new settler state. As in Rhodesia, the resident governor almost never exercised his veto power over legislation. Similarly, the premier agency responsible for Anglo-Ulster relations, the Home Office in London, played a minimal role in the province.^[20] Its skeleton staff for Northern Ireland affairs operated under the (incorrect) assumption that "questions of law and order are entirely for the Government of Northern Ireland"^[21] As one Home Secretary admitted, "I had no occasion to seek more work or to go out and look at the problems of Northern Ireland, unless they forced themselves upon me."^[22] With respect to internal affairs, the metropolitan government in effect treated Ulster and Rhodesia as if they were independent states.

Finally, the fact that the Unionist regime was based on majority rule gave it a measure of moral capital that settler minorities elsewhere could never claim. That this majority status depended on an artificially created Protestant enclave was beside the point. The contested origins and problematic existence of the Ulster state were irrelevant to metropolitan elites as long as political stability and the trappings of democracy were visible. Majority rule was at that time identified with democratic gov-

[19] Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson, The State in Northern Ireland: 1921–1972 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 185–86.

[20] Bew, Gibbon, and Patterson, The State, p. 177.

[21] Frank Newsam, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, quoted in ibid.

[22] James Callaghan, A House Divided: The Dilemma of Northern Ireland (London: Collins, 1973), p. 4.

ernment in the United Kingdom. No alternative political system—such as power sharing—seemed acceptable in the Ulster context. London assumed that majority rule would operate satisfactorily and the 1920 act contained no special protections for the Catholic minority or inducements for their political participation.^[23] In practice, majority rule in Ulster was a recipe for permanent settler rule and "majority dictatorship."^[24]