‘All human histories are provisional; none will have the last word’
– Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob
‘[M]any people in Ireland retain a strong sense of their received version of history as a personal possession’, observes Patrick Maume, ‘and react angrily to what they experience as attempted dispossession.’1 But, neither Irish land nor Irish history is ultimately owned by people in Ireland (facts that may be unpalatable to many): property is tied up in the international markets and the past is tied up with transnational developments. Consequently, Ian McBride, for example, has chosen to ‘write the history of Ireland from the outside in – to begin, that is, with the central features of eighteenth-century Europe and to trace the ways in which they were mapped onto the Irish situation’.2 Similarly, we have chosen to address a question that has global relevance (how is the violence of the start of a civil war produced?) by studying two local cases (the start of the Troubles in Belfast and Derry). This has necessarily meant breaking with constitutional nationalist, republican, socialist and unionist narratives – from the beginning of our book through to its endings. We have not chosen to end with, say, the killing of three off-duty British soldiers in Belfast, internment, the killing of eleven civilians by the British army in Ballymurphy, Bloody Sunday or direct rule. Instead, we have taken the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas’s general definition of civil war, applied it to Belfast and Derry and, accordingly, constructed our separate endings. Kalyvas’s definition is ‘agnostic about causes’, yet some readers may still be offended that we have chosen to end when we have and that we have ended at different times because it does not fit with their version of how the Troubles is to be explained.3 After all, endings as well as beginnings lock in narrative meaning. All that we can do here is stress once again that we are not exploring the origins of the Troubles, that we are not presenting the full story of these years and that we are not drawing attention away from people’s suffering.
This book has engaged with scholarly debates that are both more general and more particular than the ones which are related to the causes of the Northern Irish conflict. We have chosen to cross over disciplinary divides and join our neighbours across the academy – political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and economists – in trying to better understand political violence. In the preceding chapters, we have had something to say about whether violence should be conceived as a degree of conflict or a form of conflict; about how non-violent action works; about the range of constitutional, non-violent and violent strategies and about how they can be used in combination; about whether an increase in protest comes from a build up of frustration or from fresh power to fight for change; about the links between riots and elections; about the puzzling impact of repression; about what leads certain crowd events to become violent; about the reasoning behind the selection of violent strategies; about political action outside movements and institutions; about the relationship between polarization and violence; about the part played by narrative in the turn to violence; about the connection between international politics and internal conflict; and about the effectiveness of violence.
But, for all that, we nonetheless remain historians first and foremost. Confronted with what Peter Mandler describes as ‘the profound strangeness and diversity of the past’, we are therefore reluctant to push our arguments too far. In this book, we have simply presented the most convincing interpretation of what happened in Belfast and Derry at the start of the Troubles that we could construct from available sources. We will not pretend that we have produced a general history (a history of its capital and second cities is not a history of Northern Ireland) let alone general theories which can be applied across time and across cultures (our goal has been to suggest questions to scholars working on related subjects, not to set down models for them to follow). This should not be mistaken for a lack of ambition. Given that the humanities and social sciences are being made to draw inspiration from the markets, historians should perhaps aspire to be the regulators; when academics from other disciplines occasionally show, in Mandler’s words, ‘universalizing hubris’, claiming to have ‘unlocked the secrets of human behaviour’, historians can tender a check.4 To paraphrase the longest-serving Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, our job should be to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.5 Sadly, there are many, many people in Ireland today who can easily recognize just how important it is for such a job to be done properly.
We offer no apologies for making the story of the start of the Troubles harder to simplify, harder to contain and harder to use. It is not our book’s function to aid the search for a useable past, to nourish a narrative of peace and reconciliation or struggle and liberation. The relevance of the past, we would argue, actually lies in its alien character. Reflecting on what was once perceived to be both possible and impossible expands our imagination and offers us new ways of looking critically not just at our own time but at ourselves, too. Although we have to accept that we can only hope to understand the past through what traces it has left behind of itself in the present and within the constraints imposed by our own culture (broadly defined), such scepticism can have its comforts. The world will keep changing, and so will the ways in which historians study the past. There will always be something new to be said about the start of the Troubles.