‘The moral rearmament of imperialism’: the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Northern Ireland conflict, and the new world order, 1981-1994

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through four thematic sections, this article explains why, from its inception in 1981, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) espoused ‘unconditional support’ for ‘Irish freedom’, and why this position changed in the 1990s. Illuminating a particularly functional mode of radical solidarity, it argues that British leftists engaged with the Northern Ireland conflict to articulate their revolutionary praxis. Advocating ‘unconditional support’ enabled the RCP to challenge reformism on the British left and nationalism in the labour movement. As the article’s second section demonstrates, such specific left-wing anti-imperialism irked Provisional republican leaders, who demanded a more substantial, inclusive solidarity movement in Britain. The article’s third section elucidates how the Cold War’s denouement from the late 1980s deepened strategic and ideological differences among radicals. Seeking to replicate peace processes in Israel-Palestine and South Africa, Provisional republicans envisaged a negotiated transfer of power in the ‘new world order’. By contrast, lambasting western intervention in the Gulf and the Balkans, RCP theoreticians lamented the ‘moral rearmament of imperialism’. The nascent republican peace strategy of the 1990s conclusively exposed deep-rooted tensions within the RCP’s peculiar solidarity. For disillusioned cadres who had endorsed republicanism only insofar as it threatened the British state, republicanism’s new constitutionalism represented capitulation.