A question of national identity or minority rights? The changing status of the Irish language in Ireland since 1922

When the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, the Irish language was a substantial feature of the politics that led up to this event. Subsequently the language was recognised as the national and first official language of the Irish Free State. Since then, the de jure position of Irish appears to have evolved. Most recently, legislation was introduced in the Republic of Ireland, and statutory duties were placed upon certain public bodies with regard to the Irish language in Northern Ireland. This article examines this historical shift in the status of Irish in the two political jurisdictions in Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland [as a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK)], and explains its significance.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

The myth of Aeneas: The Italian Archaeological Mission in Albania, 1924–43

Abstract

The development of archaeology in Italy during the first decades of this century led to a partial rejection of positivist principles of experimentation in favour of a historically-based idealist philosophy. Under the Fascist regime archaeology was used to create and sustain the political mythology of Romanità. Excavations in central Rome sought to highlight the physical connections between the Rome of Augustus and that of Mussolini as well as emphasising the links between the chain of ‘great men’, who had created and sustained the Roman state.

The Italian archaeological mission to Albania was established against this background, with the aim of reinforcing Italian hegemony to the east of the Adriatic. The means of achieving this varied from reinforcing Albanian historical preconceptions to emphasising the mythological connections and traditional civilising mission of Rome in the Balkans. Within these political objectives, the mission was able to follow a serious scientific research programme, although full publication was prevented by the outbreak of war. Thereafter, the changed political situation enforced the abandonment of the project.     

Anarchists and national identity: The case of German radicals in the United States and Brazil, 1880–1945

How German were German anarchists in the United States and Brazil? Did the experience of exile and immigration preserve or even heighten a national identity among radicals who openly espoused revolutionary internationalism? Anarchists distinguished between nation and nationality on the one hand, and the state and nationalism on the other. This article examines expressions of nationality by a handful of German anarchist editors and writers from the 1880s to the end of World War II. They wanted to be stateless, but not nationless. This article argues that German exile anarchists in the United States and Brazil expressed a militant, countercultural, antistatist and anticlerical nationality. They were ‘rooted cosmopolitans’: They identified with the international revolutionary tradition and at the same time remained attached to Germany's heritage of radical politics, arts and humanities. There was a remarkable consistency in their commentary levelled against Bismarck, the Kaiser, the Weimar government and the Nazis either in Germany or in the host country. Anarchists advocated for a borderless global federation of free communities and, to that end, rejected nationalism and urged people to stop ‘seeing like a state’ by exposing the false promises and crimes of statism.