Irish Nationalist Political Ideology in the Aftermath of the Second South African War

Anti-imperialism, in one form or another, was a persistent, explicit, and coherent theme within Irish nationalist political ideology from the mid-nineteenth century onward.  In the late 1870s, a number of Irish MPs led by Charles Stuart Parnell had broken ranks with the parliamentary leadership and made a critique of empire central to their more aggressive policy at Westminster. Parnell’s Home Rulers were not separatists and their concept of nationality was fully compatible with continued Irish membership in the British Empire (on revised terms).  In this paper, however, I argue that the Second South African War marked the beginning of a major shift in Irish nationalist political ideology insofar as the conflict offered advanced nationalists the opportunity to reclaim anti-imperialism as a form of separatist nationalism.  Although at the war’s end Arthur Griffith and James Connolly remained on the margins of Irish politics, they had seized control of one of the most dynamic currents within nationalist discourse and had established themselves as heirs to the separatist anti-imperialism of John Mitchel. While it may not have appeared so at the time, Griffith and Connolly emerged from the war with the ideological advantage in the sense that they were now identified as the most anti-imperial element within Irish nationalism. This was enough to sustain their respective movements until the next imperial crisis – the Great War – once again put the Irish Parliamentary Party and the British Empire on the defensive. Looking ahead then, the paper shows that Irish nationalists continued to employ this anti-imperial discourse long after the South African War had ended.  Home Rule nationalism was to be irreversibly eclipsed in the wake of the 1916 Rising, not least because it had ceased to reflect nationalist political ideology insofar as it did not and could not reflect a separatist anti-imperialism.