1916 (57 page)

1916 and ‘just war’ theory

Clarification of the ‘just war’ concept is in order. First, the term ‘just war’ is a misnomer, since there is nothing good or just about war as such. It causes death, suffering and destruction, and always involves a loss of wellbeing. The misnomer misdirects moral evaluation, as though we are to focus on the state of affairs of war itself, as distinct from the actions of the protagonists. This can be clarified by considering the case of a police officer and a violent criminal engaged in physical combat. They are, so to speak, in a ‘state of war’, from which injury or killing is a possible outcome. However, moral evaluation, while cognisant of the loss of wellbeing involved in such an outcome, focuses primarily on the respective
actions
.
Although the respective physical behaviours may be similar – striking, shooting, physically overpowering the other – the action of the criminal is morally wrong whereas that of the police officer is morally permissible, and possibly even morally required.

Thus, ‘just war’ theory focuses on the morality of the respective
actions
of the protagonists. The
outcome
(in death, suffering and destruction) is
relevant to that evaluation, but it is not the primary focus. Accordingly, it would be better to think of it as a theory laying down the criteria for permissible resort to force or justifiable use of military power.

Second, ‘just war’ theory is part of a larger theory of good governance, concerning the balance to be struck between keeping the peace and avoiding war on one hand, and resisting armed aggression on the other. In the case of an insurrection, where one of the protagonists is not a recognised government, it is more difficult to see how to connect it to a political theory of governance. It would have to be closely tied to the self-defence of those taking up arms.

The theory is made up of (a) criteria to be met before resorting to war
(
ius ad bellum
)
and (b) criteria for the conduct of the war
(
ius in bello
)
.

The criteria for being justified in resorting to arms are: (i) just cause; (ii) competent authority; (iii) comparative justice; (iv) right intention; (v) reasonable prospect of success; (vi) last resort; (vii) proportionality. That is also their logical order, so that, if the proposed resort to force doesn’t pass the earlier criteria then passing the later criteria will be either impossible or irrelevant. Lack of just cause excludes right intention and ensures the irrelevance of a good prospect of success.

The 1916 Rising doesn’t pass the criteria. The insurgents didn’t have a just cause. Just cause is constituted by unprovoked armed inter-state aggression, such as Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914, or a government committing genocide against some of its own people. Nothing remotely comparable occurred in Ireland in the period prior to 1916. One could accept that Britain’s ruling Ireland was the outcome of ‘historic injustice’ and that the legitimacy of British rule in Ireland was deeply flawed, but that would not suffice to constitute just cause in 1916.

The Rising’s leadership did not amount to a competent authority. A group can’t constitute itself a government simply by declaring itself to be such: it must have some recognisable legitimacy or
de facto
control. Only the British government and/or the Irish party, representing the majority of Irish people, could have had either in 1916.

Without just cause or competent authority, the Rising’s passing any of the other criteria is irrelevant. Even if it had passed both, it couldn’t have passed some of the others: it had no reasonable prospect of success (as its leaders knew), and it was not the last resort. Lack of those two alone would mean it failed proportionality as well.

The criteria for just conduct in war are: (i) not targeting non-combatants, and (ii) not causing disproportionate suffering. The first was violated
by the shooting out of hand of a number of civilians, such as the unarmed Constable James O’Brien outside Dublin Castle, and the man who wouldn’t surrender his cart to be used in a barricade at Stephen’s Green. Generally, however, the insurgents did not target civilians. As regards (ii), since starting the insurrection was unjustified, the causing of any casualties (in this instance ‘over 250 civilians, 130 members of the Crown forces and over 60 insurgents’) can’t be proportionate.
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II. E
THICAL FRAMEWORKS

The role of context

Applying just war criteria is a dry, scholastic exercise. As presented schematically above, it involves a good deal of detaching or abstracting from the wider context. For such a significant historical event, a richer contextualisation is necessary. The rest of this paper will be concerned with contextually-oriented ethical evaluation of the Rising.

It is important not to exaggerate the weight to be placed on context, and to be aware of the problems in explaining by appeal to context. For a start, to say something is to be ‘understood in context’ is a truism: the challenge is to pick out the
relevant
explanatory elements in the context. Next, excessive emphasis on context is vulnerable to a possible infinite regress or circular reasoning: the explaining contextual features are themselves also presumably to be explained by context. That can be avoided only if one can say something about major events without being very heavily dependent on contextual explanation. Thus, the rather a-contextual application of ‘just war’ theory to the Easter Rising, even if inadequate, is not to be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant.

Context can be differentiated into synchronic and diachronic sub-contexts. In the case of the former, one explains by appeal to other events more or less contemporary with the event in question. For the Easter Rising, the home rule bill of 1914, the First World War, and the relative political situations of the Irish party, Sinn Féin (SF), the Ulster unionists, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) feature in the relevant context. As regards diachronic sub-contexts, we can differentiate between past and future: what led up to the Rising and what followed from it. The first is the previous history of Ireland, particularly (but not exclusively) as interpreted in the nationalist tradition originating in the Young Irelanders
of the 1840s, and leading up to the Rising. The second is the history of the effects of the Easter Rising, which have been substantial, emotionally charged, and ambiguous. It may not be relevant for historical explanation of an event, but it is relevant to the ethicist’s evaluation of that event.

The elements of ethical analysis

First, as noted, fuller ethical analysis of something like the Easter Rising requires appropriate attention to contexts. It is worth noting that the historian’s contextual analysis of a particular event cannot but carry some element of ethical evaluation, however implicit. Thus, though it is not the historian’s goal, ethical analysis is not extraneous or alien to historical understanding.

Second, ethical analysis can focus on (a) persons’ characters and motives, (b) actions and policies, or (c) consequences and outcomes. As regards (a), evaluation of individuals, including character and motives, is a matter for the biographer, and can’t be provided here. Since our focus is the event of the Rising, what I will have to say about individuals will be indirect, arising from ethical analysis of policies or consequences.

Item (b), evaluation of actions and the policies that give the actions their intentionality or meaning is central to the task. The synchronic aspect of context (crudely, what other groups were up to at the time) is directly relevant to that.
³

Evaluation of consequences (item (c)) also comes into play, since what has flowed from the Easter Rising affects its ethical evaluation. There is a problem here for the ethicist, in that agents can never foresee with certainty all the consequences of their actions. Sometimes agents can be ‘morally lucky’ or ‘morally unlucky’, in the sense of the consequences of their actions turning out a lot better or a lot worse than might be expected. Allowing for that, I think that reasonably expectable consequences, rather than actual consequences, should be what we weigh. This will involve a tangential view of people’s character, primarily in that good intentions will not excuse folly, nor make up for prudence, foresight and some understanding of others.

Third, ethical context usually involves an ethical-political framework. It involves identifying the values to be sought, and the norms to be observed with respect to the choice of actions in pursuing those values. Such frameworks include (for example) nationalism, pluralist liberal democracy, Marxism, and Christian social theory. I shall ignore Marxism since it is irrelevant here. Whatever about its role in Connolly’s earlier
work, and even allowing for some suspicion between the Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army in the General Post Office (GPO) that Easter week, it casts little light on his involvement in the Easter Rising. I shall also have relatively little to say about Christian social theory. I note in passing that its values, particularly as expressed in Catholic moral theory, are closer to liberal democratic than to nationalist values.

The nationalist ethical framework views the IRB, Sinn Féin and the cultural nationalists as pursuing goals oriented to such values as national independence and self-determination, where those values outweighed virtually all others. They understood what they were doing as part of the Irish nation’s long struggle, not just to win national independence, but also to come to a kind of collective spiritual self-consciousness as a nation. Everything else was to be evaluated in light of whether it promoted or hindered that goal, and the people competent to make such evaluation were those steeped in the culture, language, and legends of Ireland, those in tune with Ireland’s soul.

The ethical framework of liberal democracy is concerned with representative democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It is largely accepted and endorsed by contemporary western and Irish culture, and hence will be important in this paper. Elements of it were mentioned favourably by the men and women of 1916, although in ways that suggest that it did not cross their minds that it could be incompatible with certain interpretations of nationalism. The bulk of the ethical critique of the 1916 Rising comes from that background, particularly since the 1970s. Moral revulsion in the 1970s at the political philosophy of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence it supported cast Easter 1916 in a morally unfavourable light for those holding liberal democratic values.

The choice of ethical framework

The significance of there being more than one ethical–political framework is that the respective values or priorities may be mutually incompatible. Nationalism and liberal democracy, compatible on many points, diverge, if not as regards the values, at least as regards their relative importance or the appropriate order of priority. Consider the hypothetical questions: ‘If 90 per cent of the people of Ireland, north and south, voted in the morning to re-join the United Kingdom and be ruled from Westminster, should that be accepted?’ or: ‘If you had to choose between living in an independent Ireland under a dictatorship or living in an Ireland ruled democratically
and with due respect for human rights as part of a United Kingdom, which would you choose?’ The questions are hypothetical in that we actually have both independence and democracy, and no risk of being obliged to choose. In another way, they have not been hypothetical, for IRA campaigns since 1922 have been an attempt to impose one answer, and Irish governments’ repression of the IRA was an insistence on the opposite answer.

Questions about what people would do in counterfactual circumstances (circumstances not currently obtaining) are hypothetical; but the values revealed by their answers are not hypothetical. There is nothing hypothetical about values, for values inform moral and political beliefs, beliefs motivate and guide action, and actions have consequences.

There is a question mark over the democratic credentials of the Easter Rising’s leaders,
as over those of the IRB since its establishment in 1858.
⁴
This does not mean that the Easter leaders were opposed in principle to democracy. But if democracy as currently experienced was flawed by their standards, or corrupted beyond redemption through being associated with any kind of submission to or involvement with Britain (essentially the IRB view), then it couldn’t count as a democracy, certainly not something with any kind of moral or political authority. In a word, the leaders of the Rising were not democrats in practice: they were nationalists first, and their understanding of democracy was subordinate to their understanding of nationalism.

In the spring of 1922, prominent IRA leaders such as Rory O’Connor and Liam Mellows made it clear that they would impose a military dictatorship on behalf of the 1916 republic, if the outcome of Dáil votes or general elections was not satisfactory. Many of the relatives of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation rejected the legitimacy of the Free State and regarded its democratic credentials as insignificant if not fraudulent, in some cases for decades after the Civil War ended. It is striking how scant in the debates about accepting the Treaty are the references to ascertaining or being governed by the popular will. This applies not just to anti-Treaty figures, but also to pro-Treaty military and IRB figures such as Collins.
⁵

There is a problem, then, with 1916 in the liberal democratic ethical–political framework. The position is less clear in the nationalist ethical–political framework, for one could have shared the values of the 1916 leaders but disagreed with them on tactics; perhaps Eoin MacNeill might fit that description. I emphasise that there is no escaping the choice of some ethical–political framework. There is no ethical perspective or standing point that transcends all ethical–political frameworks: one must choose.