Any just settlement is going to involve a reckoning with the rights and political interests of Ukrainians who haven’t had a voice in Kyiv or the West for years.
Any just settlement of this conflict is going to involve a reckoning with the rights and political interests of Ukrainians who haven’t had a voice in Kyiv or in the West for years.
T erence Dooley begins one chapter of his book Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish County House in a Time of War and Revolution with this quotation from a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy:
“The Irish Republican Army came out by night and by day we did the opposite: we went about our affairs in daylight and during the hours of darkness we locked ourselves (as securely as we could) into our houses. . . . The castle then seemed extra vast and lonely. Every night . . . in tweed skirt and thick shoes, with valuables packed in suitcases ready to throw out of the window, I lay awake. . . . When dawn came and the birds twittered, I slept.”
— Mabel M. Annesley
The Big Houses were already on their way out. The Land Wars in Ireland in the previous century had driven many English aristocrats back home. Then the Great War quite literally killed many of the would-be heirs of these estates. If that hadn’t been enough reason to close up the castles and old estates, an intentional plan to liquidate this landed aristocracy via taxation by the government was calibrated by Prime Minister Lloyd George to destroy the survivors. But some of the more radical elements of the IRA also just kicked out the Big House residents, as potent symbols of colonial expropriation, and burned their places down.
The burning and looting of these properties are one among several indignities suffered by what might be called “the other Ireland.” The one that might be loyalist in sentiment, or that just might not be nationalist or Catholic enough for the Ireland that was being built from the ashes of the Easter Rising to the establishment of Éamon de Valera’s Bunreacht na hÉireann — the Constitution of Ireland. For reasons of taxation, a cultural climate reflected in new laws against divorce, or the threat of violence, the Protestant population in the 26 counties precipitously declined after 1920.
This is the hangover and backwash of radical nationalism. And anyone like me, who grew up on and continues to love Irish rebel ballads and nationalist aspirations, has been forced to confront this “other Ireland” in history, and in fact. This other Ireland didn’t just lose prestige and unearned inherited power, it frequently suffered injustice and persecution. The Irish Free State, in its best impulses, tried to reassure this minority with gestures, such as giving Douglas Hyde, a Protestant Irish nationalist, the presidency of the new country.
Americans who have supported Ukraine in its struggle against Russian invasion have, this week, experienced the first onset of this inevitable nationalist hangover. Zelensky’s government has passed a law repealing the function of Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions, in the name of countering Russian influence, inducing a round of criticism even from some of Ukraine’s most stalwart champions.
It is not unusual for Americans to over-romanticize the nationalisms of others. Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth went on a popular tour in America in the 19th century. So did Éamon de Valera after the First World War, promoting and fundraising for the Irish nationalist struggle during the Anglo-Irish war.
George Orwell said this kind of “transferred nationalism” allowed people, especially liberal intellectuals, to be more enthusiastic and vulgar in support of a nationalist cause than they would be for their native country, whose faults are better known to them. Americans had little idea what injustices were done by Hungarian nationalists in their campaigns of Magyarization. Similarly, Irish America knew the historic oppression of their cousins but little about the other Ireland.
We know there is an “other Ukraine” than what is represented by the government in Kyiv and by Zelensky; in fact, Zelensky was elected by much of that other Ukraine. We have evidence of its existence in the million people who, for reasons of family ties or ethnic affinities, decided to seek refuge from the war in Russia rather than in the West. We see it in the memoirs of men like Volodymyr Ischenko, a son of what used to be a class of Ukrainians partly defined by their formation under Sovietism, and now politically orphaned. They have no interest in either Putin’s project or those of the nationalists in Kyiv. We see evidence of it in the kinds of restrictive laws that Ukraine has passed trying to de-Russify itself, whether in language or religion.
Previously, Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist excesses have been excused or marginalized. When the parliament voted to celebrate, in a peculiarly obnoxious way, the legacy of Ukrainian nationalist and Nazi Stepan Bandera, it made news only in Poland, whose government yelped on behalf of the Poles whom Bandera wanted liquidated from Ukraine in his time. Ukraine’s legislative assault on the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been highlighted by Tucker Carlson as an “attack on Christianity.” But this overstatement made it easy for the government’s defenders to portray it as a necessary counter to Russian influence through a clerical class. The fact is, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had done much to separate itself from Russian political influence since Ukrainian independence and the onset of the war. But the government of Ukraine is waging an aggressive campaign of Ukrainization in which those steps weren’t enough.
As much as Putin has falsely blurred the lines between Ukrainian and Russian identity to justify his campaign, Ukrainian ultranationalists have tried to draw lines too sharply, cutting deeply into familial and ethno-religious loyalties. Responsible governments recognize that if one in ten people have a religious affiliation, even one out of fashion with the government, then that is a fact of cultural diversity and pluralism that must be accommodated, and that can be subdued or suppressed only with injustice.
Such talk will be dismissed as Russian talking points, but that is beyond anyone’s control. Every side makes talking points of their opponents’ injustices and crimes. Any just settlement of this conflict is going to involve a reckoning with the rights and political interests of Ukrainians who haven’t had a voice in Kyiv or in the West for years.