13 - ‘British We Are and British We Stay’: Troubles

Summary

No account of the global convulsions of Britishness in the decades after the Second World War can ignore the outbreak of the Northern Ireland Troubles in the late 1960s. This chapter sets out to tie this explosive episode into the global dynamics of the break-up of Greater Britain in two key respects. First, the climate of acute adveristy for colonialism worldwide provided ample encouragement and legitimacy to the ‘anti-colonialist’ credentials of militant nationalism. And second, and more significantly, the reaction of the Unionist majority cannot be viewed in isolation from the wider repercussions of Britain’s imperial endgame. The spectacle of a British government turning its back on longstanding moral commitments abroad (from East of Suez to Rhodesia, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands) only heightened suspicion that Protestant Ulster would be next in line. Ultimately, it was as much to combat English incomprehension of their plight that Protestant Loyalists resorted to a beleaguered militancy as the touchstone of their Britishness, unwittingly distancing themselves further from their ‘mainland’ counterparts.