An Anti-Imperial Empire? Ireland and the Empire during the Debates over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 mandated Irish inclusion in the British Empire, much to the disdain of most Irish nationalists.  The Treaty was hotly debated in Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, before being approved by a slim majority.  Supporters of the Treaty had to either minimize the impact of Irish entry into the Empire, or to somehow turn it to Ireland’s advantage.  Seeking to build on revolutionary-era Irish anti-imperialism, while still accepting and promoting the Treaty, pro-Treatyites claimed that the Empire could be turned against Britain and become an anti-imperial entity.  The Treaty explicitly gave Ireland the same status as Canada, and pro-Treatyites argued that this ensured that all the Dominions would have a vested interest in protecting Ireland from further British interference, as any British meddling in Ireland would implicitly attack the sovereignty of all Dominions.  Rather than seeing the Empire as a vehicle for the transmission of British values, or as a shared economic and cultural zone, pro-Treatyites saw it as an alliance of Dominions against the metropole, an anti-imperial Empire.  Anti-Treatyites, on the other hand, viewed the Empire as a source of tyrannical repression, not of liberation and protection.  They claimed that Ireland would not enjoy Canada’s freedoms because British non-interference in Canada was more a product of geography than of fixed law or precedent.  Where the British would be unlikely to interfere in Canadian affairs because of the distance between the two territories, as well as the relative lack of importance of Canada to British security, the British government would never permit a similarly free Dominion to evolve so close to British shores.  These competing visions of Empire clashed during the debates over the Treaty, and played a key role in determining the course of Irish foreign policy during the first decades of independence.