Civil war, in any nation and at any time, represents the breakdown of fundamental common agreements universally shared by members of the society. It is the undoing of civility. The process may occur slowly or with alarming rapidity, but civil war is the culmination of a process whereby traditional mechanisms employed to forge agreement among diverse and, perhaps, competing sectors of the community are no longer available or viable. Differences become so hardened that neither power nor political authority can achieve agreement. In their place polarized ideologies emerge and crystallize, contesting the given arrangements of the society. A public order in which members “agree to disagree” does not exist. Civil war, in short, reveals, by their very absence, those conditions necessary for political and social order to prevail.

Because of the centrality of the Civil War to modern Irish politics and its obstruction to the initial establishment of a modern democratic order, it is important to understand the causes and character of the war. In this chapter, the question to be addressed is, why, despite the substantial consensus that characterized the nationalist struggle for political independence, did the factors surrounding the Civil War so rapidly and decisively produce major political schisms? The objective is to understand why the Irish public was incapable of resisting the dissolution of political order.

Most immediately, the Civil War was a dispute over the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, that is, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

Introduction: the Irish public and its problem

In the past four chapters, attention was directed to the political institutions, with little emphasis on the fractious and fragile character of the Irish public. The Civil War and the persisting debate over the meaning of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, it has been argued, ensured at best a weak public sphere incapable of generating a moral consensus on the role and aims of the state and its relations with other nations. The result was the one-sided achievement of the Cosgrave government; institutional efficacy was secured through the successful manipulation and enhancement of its resources, but political integration did not result.

Given its commitment to strengthen the democratic institutions, Cumann na nGaedheal was unable, at the same time, to strengthen popular identification with the policies and purposes of the state. At its most efficacious, the government was capable only of demanding political participation by the opposition; it could not create the integration necessary for stability to be secured. Although Cumann na nGaedheal could demand – because of the now enhanced resources of the state – a functioning party system, it could not create a party able to end the political and cultural rifts in the nation. As I have suggested, Cumann na nGaedheal's was no modest accomplishment. Nevertheless, if more substantive political integration was to be achieved and a more integrated public produced, Fianna Fail would have to accomplish it.

Why have so many of the newly independent nations of the twentieth century been racked by political disorder and social instability? Why have so few been successful in establishing stable, regular patterns of institutional relations that promote the well-being of their citizens and enhance their nation's position among the community of nations? Why has the ordering of their societies according to democratic principles been so elusive an achievement? These problems of instability and disorder have commanded the attention of scholars at least since the 1960s, when many nations emerged from their dependent colonial status and attempted to develop into politically independent, self-sustaining entities.

This book represents another effort to answer these questions. Yet the approach taken here differs from previous ones in at least two ways. First, rather than focusing on those societies in which instability has prevailed, I direct attention to a newly independent nation of the twentieth century – the Republic of Ireland – where a stable political order has, in fact, been successfully established. By appreciating the success of the Irish political elite in creating a stable political order, it is argued, we may gain a greater understanding of the obstacles that have prevented other new nations from following the Irish pattern. Second, and more fundamentally, the theoretical approach used to examine the accomplishment of Irish stability differs substantively from that of the vast body of modernization literature.

Introduction: the changing political context

In July 1927, Kevin O'Higgins, vice president of the Executive Council and minister for justice, was fatally shot in a street outside of Dublin on his way to Sunday mass. He was one of the most outspoken, prominent, and competent members of Cosgrave's government and one of the chief architects of Cosgrave's program to secure social order in the Free State. He was hardly loved by the Republican forces; in his ferocious commitment to the Free State, he was strongly identified with the repressive side of Cosgrave's rule. His assassination rocked the government and the nation; because of his identification with the forces of order, his death demonstrated the ever-present specter of violence lurking just beneath the political surface. Although it was an isolated event for which no political or military group claimed credit or accepted responsibility, the assassination was widely interpreted, by government leaders and the population in general, as evidence of the persistence of physical force, however weak, and the dangers it posed for political stability.

This chapter examines the government's response; it was the response to the assassination, and not the act itself, I will argue, that constituted this third political crisis. For reasons that will be made clear, this was a crisis of the government's own making. In an important sense, the government took advantage of the assassination to complete the project it had created for itself in responding to the previous two crises.

The army mutiny revealed the fragile and contentious character of democratic norms in a society with deeply rooted value conflicts. But the government's success in quieting the political challenge meant that contending normative claims were no longer the stuff of political opposition movements, even though these issues had hardly been resolved decisively. Contending beliefs concerning the allocation and distribution of resources remained intense; only the government's efficacy in changing the mutiny to a question of political policy prevented that issue from further undermining a weak public sphere. The normative question receded into the background of Free State politics.

As this chapter will illustrate, successful crisis resolution in the Free State would have important consequences for subsequent politics. The government's success in handling one crisis helped shape the character of political expression following it. We can posit a kind of “value-added” political analysis. The Free State, in suppressing the Civil War, weakened the power of value-oriented political conflicts while paving the way for a norm-oriented political challenge, that is, the army mutiny. Similarly, by demonstrating the strength of the political structures in containing the mutiny – the government's ability to subdue normative challenges, to transform principled opposition into issues of policy, and to preserve social order – meant that the subsequent political contests in the Free State shifted downward to organizational battles between political units.

Introduction: the political context of crisis politics

The following three chapters will examine a major political crisis in the Free State during its first decade. As I will argue, these crises revealed the kinds of political obstacles – and how they changed over time – that the political leaders had to confront and overcome in their efforts to construct a modern, democratic order. Most broadly, these crises were political expressions of the competing cultural currents in Irish society. Especially in the early part of the decade, challenges to political order were understood and typically expressed through these cultural prisms. As I suggested in Chapter 3, these cultural strains became institutionalized through the constitutional drafting process. As I indicated, the result was paradoxical. Rather than solving the problem of contending cultural currents, the Constitution only amalgamated them into a single document. As the decade progressed, as the next chapters will detail, challenges to the political regime were less frequently expressed in broad cultural terms and increasingly in constitutional, even public policy, terms.

But I will argue that the shift in political language over the decade cannot be interpreted as the result of decreasing cultural opposition. Rather, different understandings of the Irish government continued to animate political life, but as the regime became increasingly adept at demonstrating its political control and authority, and as it appropriated greater political resources on its own behalf, political discourse became less general and confrontational.

This book explores the achievement of democratic stability in Ireland during its first decade of independence from Britain, 1922–32. A newly independent nation of the twentieth century, Ireland is among a select few nations that has succeeded in transforming political and cultural divisions into a common base of support for the democratic government. The reasons for this Irish accomplishment are the subject of the following analysis. The purpose is both to better understand the Irish case and to shed new light on the problem of democratic stability (and instability) in newly independent nations of the twentieth century.

In the following chapters, I pose two questions: First, how were deeply divided political cultural traditions coexisting in Ireland transposed into support for democratic institutions? This question explores the problem of political institutionalization when social groups adhere to systems of meaning hostile to the existence of those institutions. The second question considers the same problem from a different angle: How do political institutions, guided by a particular ruling elite, succeed in developing democratic institutions that express and confirm patterns of thought and belief in the political community? This question leads to a consideration of the ways in which social meanings in the political community shape and influence the functioning of a political apparatus. The book examines how new democratic institutions, in their quest for broad-based social support, are constrained and molded by prevailing social understandings.

Ireland's democratic achievement, as I have argued, was a result both of Cumann na nGaedheal's unflagging commitment to parliamentary structures, despite the political costs to the party, and of Fianna Fáil's strengthening of the public by including culturally disaffected members. The need for both strong institutions, buffered from the population, and cultural integration involved the creation of a uniquely Irish pattern of democracy. It was a pattern deeply beholden to parliamentary forms while simultaneously responsive to the understandings of politics that emerged through the Irish public. Fianna Fáil's success in broadening the social composition of the public required new patterns of relatedness between the political elite, the institutions of rule, and the public.

In every society where the social composition of the public has expanded, the character of democratic politics has been profoundly altered. When, for example, the working classes in England, France, and Germany gained political rights, party systems were transformed, political accountability was expanded, and the criteria for political decision making became more articulate and universalistic. Politics was no longer the preserve of an elite few, nor was the state in service solely to a relatively small, privileged group.

The expansion of the public in Ireland produced similarly dramatic shifts in the nature of politics and the extent of elite accountability. But because this occurred in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, and after the population had been substantially mobilized and politicized in the nationalist struggle, the meaning and consequence of a broader public were very different.

Introduction: constitutionalism and order in new nations

I have argued that an understanding of the causes of the Civil War requires an appreciation of the competing cultural orientations that existed among the Irish population. Although ostensibly a political dispute, the Civil War expressed the resurfacing of cultural differences that had been previously subordinated to the nationalist aspirations of much of the Irish community. In order to understand the challenges faced by the leaders of the Provisional Government, it is necessary to appreciate the depth of these divisions in the political community. The government's aspiration for a civil, democratic order could be fulfilled only after these divisions had somehow been resolved. Democracy depended upon widespread agreement concerning the nature and appropriate course of the independent Irish nation. Yet this account of the cultural antinomies in the nation presents only in broad outline the political challenges faced by the new leaders.

In this chapter, I will focus on the drafting of the Free State Constitution to demonstrate more contextually and concretely how these splits impeded the ability of the Provisional Government, and later the Free State Government, to produce a united political community. An examination of the drafting process, and the content of the Constitution itself, shows the impact of competing symbolic systems and value strains on the political order.

This book presents a comparative analysis of immigration policy in six countries: Sweden, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Switzerland and the Federal Republic of Germany (hereafter called “Germany”). These six countries, referred to as the “immigration countries” or the “project countries”, have all experienced large-scale postwar immigration, and they exemplify a range of different policy responses. They provide examples of rotation or guestworker systems as well as of policies aiming at permanent settlement. They include substantial post-colonial immigration as well as recruitment of foreign labor and consequent family immigration.

This study has been organized around a series of conferences, in which the seven authors have taken part. Six countries are compared, and each author has written one chapter about his own country's immigration policy. In the case of Germany, two authors have collaborated. All the authors met first to discuss the design and content of the study and to agree on a format for each chapter. The second conference was devoted to a discussion of the first drafts of these chapters which, of course, led to discussion of each country's immigration policy as well. The third and fourth conferences concentrated on the comparative analysis presented in the second part of the book.

Although the chapters dealing with each country are based on a common outline and generally address the same questions, each author has also included a discussion of what is unique to his country. Thus, the chapters differ in length and emphasis.

Immigration and immigration policy

In the nineteenth century, Sweden was a country of emigration, and as late as 1930 the number of persons leaving the country exceeded the number entering. Not until after the Second World War were large numbers of foreign citizens employed in Sweden, and immigration did not assume major proportions until the end of the 1960s.

Sweden is today one of the world's “rich” nations, but only a century ago it occupied a position similar to that of some of the more advanced of today's “developing” countries. Industrialization started later than in continental Europe and the economy was characterized by a heavy reliance on agriculture, with people living primarily in rural areas. This was the background to the great migration to America.

The first emigrants to America included those who in the 1840s opposed the religious control of the Swedish state church. The economically motivated migration, which began in the 1890s and continued with varying degrees of intensity until the 1920s, far surpassed the more limited movements of earlier times. Approximately one million people emigrated from a total population of only around five million. Perhaps an even greater number of persons would have left had they been able to do so. Nearly everyone had relatives or friends who had emigrated, and letters to travel agents in Gothenburg show that the general interest in emigration was very strong. It is reasonable to assume that at some point most people considered leaving.

Immigrant policy slowly began to develop for several reasons. When the size of the immigrant population increased, especially the number of immigrant families, it placed burdens on the social services and led to demands from social workers for greater resources and pleas from local authorities for national or federal assistance. In some countries this development was hastened by public protests or the fear of public protests and by disorders and sometimes actual riots. When the turning point came in the early 1970s, one of the reasons cited for stopping labor immigration was to avoid exacerbating the social problems of resident immigrants. As a result of the “stop” the immigrant population became more stable. Those who returned home could not remigrate, which meant that most chose to remain; they usually qualified for permanent status and were able to send for their families to join them. Large immigrant groups were becoming potential “immigrant minorities” with special needs and problems. Immigrant policy developed as a response to this new situation.

When large-scale labor migration began, no country had an organized national immigrant policy. Voluntary organizations took care of some immigrant problems and local welfare agencies offered assistance, but in general there was no long-term planning and very little understanding of the possible effects of immigration. In guestworker countries where immigration was officially regarded as being only temporary there was no need for a comprehensive immigrant policy.

The six immigration countries studied in this book have experienced a period of large-scale immigration caused mainly by similar factors. None of these countries had planned or even foreseen an international migration of the size that actually occurred. Their reaction to this migration has been strikingly similar and at the same time decisively different, but in the long run immigration control has become more strict everywhere and active labor recruitment has been stopped; at the same time, there have been a number of improvements in the social and cultural situation of immigrants.

Selecting six countries

The project countries have been chosen partly because of their size and their large immigrant populations and partly because they offer a high degree of variation in the regulation of immigration and in immigrant policy. Germany, France and Britain were included from the outset because of their sizeable immigrant populations, and Switzerland because of its high proportion of foreigners. In addition these four countries provide examples of very different sorts of international migration as well as different immigration policies. Sweden could not be left out, partly because the initiative and financing of this study was Swedish, but more important it deserves a place as the Scandinavian country which has both admitted the most immigrants and developed first a specific immigration policy. The Netherlands was included as the sixth country because of its mixture of post-colonial and Mediterranean labor immigration, and also because of its traditional emphasis on cultural pluralism and its influence on current “ethnic minorities” policy.