The New Politics of Sinn Fein

By AM Thursday, June 23, 2011

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The conversion of Provisional Republicans from fanatical terrorists into mainstream politicians was central to this ‘new normality,’ if only because the main focus of British state strategy for nearly 40 years had been on defeating Republicanism’s political and military challenge to the constitutional status quo … As the process of institutionalisation deepens, the power of the movement becomes measured more by the ability to obtain resources and political benefits from the state on behalf of its constituency than by its commitment to radical change – Kevin Bean

Before setting out on his substantive analysis of Sinn Fein’s ‘new politics’, completed in 2007, Kevin Bean invited his audience to consider the backdrop against which his case is constructed. Provisional republicanism had come to accept the British state’s definition of the conflict and had acquiesced in what it had long opposed; Irish unity could only come with the consent of a minority in the North of Ireland. The ‘volte face’ that the Provisional leadership managed to accomplish may have been carried out with much dexterity but it had to be situated in a wider process which has been both long and complicated. Bean rose to the challenge of explaining the objective pressures and constraints that shaped the collapse of the republican dimension of the Provisional project.

The author leaves his readers in no doubt as to the outcome of the Northern conflict. Since 1998 republicanism has undergone ‘a decisive defeat.’ The resistance community became an electorate while community bodies evolved into businesses. Bean offers an illustration of this process in his comments about ‘the evolution of the Andersonstown News from a newssheet for the Andersonstown Central Civil Resistance Committee in 1972 to a privately owned media group of locally influential newspapers.’ He then complements this by shifting focus to the IRA by citing an observer of the 2005 Bodenstown commemoration: ‘gone were the paramilitary trappings and in their place a colour party wore green blazers. It could have been a parade led by tennis umpires at Wimbledon’.

While accepting that the trajectory of the Provisionals must be understood as being rooted in the dialectic between them and the British state, in this work Bean offers a more panoramic view of the array of forces that lay behind the British front lines. Rather than isolate British military strategy and corresponding political negotiations with the Provisional leadership, Bean creates a mosaic upon which a multiplicity of apparatuses were at play. These were attuned more to the Ideological State Apparatuses of Althusserian theorising than to the Repressive State Apparatuses which featured in the work of the 20th Century French Marxist thinker. The purposeful coupling of political direction with social policy would carve out a strategic cul de sac into which Provisionalism would be pushed and pulled. In the words of one former British minister the purpose was to draw Sinn Fein into ‘a very different part-public part-private partnership which was the essence of our long term solution.’ By 2000 a British secretary of state could confidently pronounce ‘today Catholics are part of the establishment as never before.’ This, added to the admission by Gerry Adams that in the South Sinn Fein is an establishment party, shows the distance travelled from the heady days of violent conflict when Sinn Fein could plausibly claim to be something other than a Catholic party for a Catholic people.

At the heart of the case made in this book is that communitarianism was a powerful ideology inserted into Northern Irish political discourse and practice primarily by the British state and European Union, but also by the British Left. Situated in a postmodernist context this influenced the Provisionals’ communal and identity politics which saw their uninterrupted drift into an accommodation with the British state on British terms.

Bean suggests that this ideological penetration of the Provisionals was in fact pushing something of an open door given the pre-existing susceptibility of the Provisionals to postmodernist influences. The reason for that susceptibility was that within the Provisional mindset identity politics had long occupied a commanding height. This came to usurp a more universalist liberationist thrust guided by a grand vision of who should run society. It is an academic way of saying the Provisionals settled for the internal conflict model long in vogue in established circles but for equally as long rejected by the Provisionals. In the stand off in the battle for definition the Provisionals were first to blink. The British had successfully defined the problem as one of two tribes rather than a national liberation struggle against a foreign power.

The upshot was the primacy of the micro-narrative identity politics rather than a nationalist or socialist macro-narrative taking a firm definitional grip on the causes and range of outcomes to the Northern conflict.

In criticising this particularism that the Provisionals lapsed into Bean needs to do more to dislodge the view that in attacking postmodernism his real target is an ideological pluralism which he finds less appealing than the more totalising grand narratives that have shaped his reading of both history and politics.

In this work Bean declines to buy into the notion of many dissenting republicans that Sinn Fein leaders simply sold out and took the bribe. In his view they were squeezed by the social and political context shaped by a British state more powerful than them. It is a necessary foil to the dubious critique that personal corruption and ambition was the primary determinant in the failure of the republican project on the Provos’ watch. Where they exist corruption and ambition are more features of the management of the defeat than they are causes of the defeat itself.

Central to grasping this is an appreciation of the advent of the community sector which helped transform the Provisionals from being challengers to British state power into a junior partner in administering that power. ‘While the Provisionals acknowledged that ultimate power resided with the British state, some of the state’s functions were in effect, sub-contracted to the Provisionals.’

Here Bean traces the importance of British state community-cum-economic initiatives initially designed to marginalise the Provisionals but which eventually brought them into the British state fold. Rather than being simply bought off ‘the powerful forces of state, economy and society provided the external context for the ideological exhaustion of the Provisional national liberation project.’ At this point republicanism gives ‘the appearance of an ideological project that has run its historical course.’

Bean tries to broaden out the explanatory framework so that the collapse of the republican dimension of the Provisional project does not come to be seen as reducible to the ‘secret diplomatic history of the IRA.’ In this sense, while not the author’s intention, it complements rather than detracts from Ed Moloney’s Secret History of the IRA by providing a backdrop against which the one man band of Adams played its diplomatic tune.

Bean suggests that in the 1980s neither Adams nor his colleagues could have known where the process of managed retreat and negotiation was leading and feels that republican critics of Sinn Fein mistakenly see in an ‘inchoate ideological direction’ a ‘deep laid plot contrived by the Adams leadership.’ He cites one former Sinn Fein ard comhairle member who felt the perspective of Adams was pragmatism rather than politics; he went where the process led him.

Against this there is the recently expressed view of another former ard comhairle member, the revisionist writer Danny Morrison, who in February past claimed the intent behind Sinn Fein’s abstentionist policy being dropped in 1986 ‘was to facilitate the opportunity - to get to the position where they are today.’ Even while this is post hoc revisionism and something Morrison, never the sharpest of analysts, realised decades after the event, there remains too much evidence against sustaining Bean’s line of reasoning that the outcome was fortuitous rather than designed. In fact the outcome was so easily read off from the facts on the ground as each stage of the process unfolded that the strategy’s republican critics could from the earliest stages accurately forecast its trajectory with consummate ease. They proffered Adams’ innate caution as the reason for what Bean terms the hesitant evolution of policy. Bean in stripping the Adams project of any teleology tends to attenuate an otherwise robust critique.

The evidence available thus far indicates that the Provisional republican venture ended up close enough to where Gerry Adams concluded it would go as far back as 1982. Rivers may change their course at times but invariably they reach the sea. Adams might have felt that given the balance of political forces it was as much as could be achieved but that is a perspective that requires a different analytical focus than what is under discussion here.

Bean introduces an element of nuance with his argument that the Provisionals were defeated not destroyed. It is a useful contextualisation in which to place the defeat. Often because there was no destruction in terms of organisational obliteration, while sufficient space was carved out to allow morphing to occur, the argument is frequently made by project apologists that somehow defeat was avoided and that a draw of sorts was achieved. Destruction, however of insurgents, is not the primary goal of modern states. Defeat followed by cooption is. Given that there has to be something to co-opt organisational structures of the former insurgents can be maintained providing that they are divested of any insurrectionary characteristics.

The New Politics of Sinn Fein adds to an ever growing understanding of how a well armed modern guerrilla movement can be neutralised. Bean outlines his perspective well but he could have explained it to so many more people had he divested the work of some of the more top heavy theorization and conceptualisation that makes an otherwise excellent book a task that academics might enjoy but which the average reader is likely to find hard going. Bean however had to press certain academic keys in order to hit a note that would be heard in the senior echelons of erudite institutions where, if he is not unfortunate, his analytical skills are likely to resound for some time to come. But the reading public who have an interest in modern Irish history would benefit enormously were a popularisation of the ideas in this book to occur. Simply put, Kevin Bean is one of the most penetrating analysts of the republican scene and his views deserve a much wider airing.

The New Politics of Sinn Fein by Kevin Bean. Liverpool University Press: 2007.