Reid, C.W. orcid.org/0000-0001-6252-6321 (2017) Democracy, Sovereignty and Unionist Political Thought during the Revolutionary Period in Ireland, c. 1912-1922. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 27. pp. 211-232. ISSN 0080-4401
Abstract
This paper examines ideas about democratic legitimacy and sovereignty within Ulster unionist political thought during the revolutionary period in Ireland (c. 1912–22). Confronted by Irish nationalists who claimed that Home Rule (and later, independence) enjoyed the support of the majority of people in Ireland, Ulster unionists deployed their own democratic idioms to rebuff such arguments. In asserting unionism’s majority status, first, across the United Kingdom and, second, within the province of Ulster, unionists mined the language of democracy to legitimise their militant stand against Home Rule. The paper also probes the unionist conception of sovereignty by examining the establishment of the Provisional Government of Ulster in 1913, which was styled as a ‘trustee’ for the British constitution in Ireland after the event of Home Rule. The imperial, economic and religious arguments articulated by unionists against Home Rule are well known, but the space given to constitutional rights and democratic legitimacy in the political language of unionism remain obscure. While the antagonisms at the heart of the revolutionary period in Ireland assumed the form of identity politics and sectarianism, the deployment of normative democratic language by unionists reveals that clashing ideals of representative government underpinned the conflict.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Royal Historical Society 2017. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Jul 2017 10:06 |
Last Modified: | 14 May 2020 12:51 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S008044011700010X |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S008044011700010X |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:118211 |