Little Big Fella

W inston Churchill recalled the horrible look that Michael Collins had after the United Kingdom delivered its final offer to end the Anglo-Irish war 100 years and a few months ago. Prime Minister Lloyd George had offered the men representing Ireland a status as a “free state” — not full political independence. There would be oaths to the king and a kind of dominion status like that of Canada or New Zealand. Also, the country would see its territory split: Six counties would belong to Northern Ireland, the statelet within the United Kingdom. For half a century Ireland had agitated for home rule, the restoration of a parliament of its own. Having been denied this by chicanery in Parliament and World War I, it then fought for the much grander goal of independence. The end result would be quasi–home rule, with partition of the island thrown in on top.

Collins was a great man of his own. With his stout and imposing frame, he was known as “the Big Fella.” Inspired by G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, he carried on his rebellion against the largest empire in history basically out in the open, riding his bicycle to his appointments. He was a pioneer of urban warfare. By cultivating a well-placed spy in Dublin Castle, he achieved what no Irishman had done, before or since — he gained an intelligence advantage over the entire British state. When his planned assassinations of British spies and informers went through, hundreds of others crowded Dublin Castle looking for an escape. His technique of flying columns and retaliatory attacks — informed by solid intel and backed up by the cooperation of the enraged Irish public — made the war into a truly unwelcome and demoralizing headache for the British state.

But here at the negotiating table, it was something different. The prime minister, flanked by his men, gave the Irish delegation a few hours to agree to the deal. At 10 p.m. that evening, they explained, a gunship would leave for Belfast either with the terms agreed, or with instructions to begin “immediate and terrible war.”

This would not be a continuation of the Irish fight with the Royal Constabulary and the ragtag Black and Tans that Collins had constantly disrupted and killed with his inventive tactics. These would be professional soldiers, working together with highly motivated Ulster militiamen — almost all of them veterans of the Great War. “Michael Collins rose looking as if he was going to shoot someone, preferably himself,” Churchill wrote.

Collins and his delegation accepted. Éamon de Valera, the president of the self-declared Irish Republic who had sent Collins there to negotiate, likely anticipating exactly this failure, rejected the treaty. The Anglo-Irish war gave way immediately to the Irish Civil War, between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions. Collins was shot and killed by Irish nationalists devoted to the cause he once led.

We are now, a century later, looking at another man who improbably rose to a kind of greatness. Like Collins he leads a nationalist rebellion — one dedicated to establishing greater freedom of independence from a more powerful neighbor, and one devoted to promoting a distinct and somewhat endangered national language and culture from the political and commercial power next door. He plays a very public role in the fight. And he will face a very similar danger.

Unless there is a coup in the Kremlin, or Ukraine’s armed forces surprise the Russians like the Japanese once did, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is going to face excruciating decisions in the weeks and months to come. He has gone from being a national celebrity — a winner on Dancing with the Stars and a role as his nation’s president on TV — to a reformist political figure, turned president, turned international hero.

Already, reports out of Israel and Turkey on the ongoing talks between Ukraine and Russia reveal what a cease-fire and post-war settlement might look like. Various reports have suggested that to save more lives, to spare the rest of his nation the horror of war, Zelensky may accept to see neutrality written into the Ukrainian constitution. Or he may accept the territorial claims Russia has made, in one form or another.

Like Collins, Zelensky will move very quickly from being the man who stood up to Vladimir Putin to the man who negotiated with him — who signed what was presented to him, or faced being responsible for yet more “immediate and terrible war.”

The heady delirium of small-state nationalist rebellion stirs up nearly millenarian impulses in a public. It is populism on cocaine. Romantic nationalists come to believe that with sufficient will — with their adamantine commitment to out-suffering their enemy — they can overturn the rules of geopolitics and the course of history. Some poet in Lviv is surely writing his own history-defining verse in the rhythmic Ukrainian tongue about how “All changed, changed utterly.”

The state that emerged in Ireland in 1922 was hobbled by geographic partition, but it emerged from its civil war, for good and ill, as a more coherent political body than the one that would have entered home rule a decade earlier. It was more Catholic, more “Gael,” more committed to cultural nationalism than any state that was configured to the territory of Ireland. It was also — as Ukraine would be without Donbas — spared some of the pain of deindustrialization that has hammered East Belfast, and the east of Ukraine. But it was still torn up by having its ideals and romance shipwrecked by geopolitical reality.

The troubles don’t end when the cease-fire comes and the treaties are signed.