The geopolitics of Republican diplomacy in the twentieth century

This paper explores what might be termed the external relations of the Irish republican movement since the foundation of the Irish state. It reflects on the ways in which republicanism’s various alliances have been analysed by the Irish, British and other states, and the impact of such analyses on state policies and actions. It asks whether “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”, rather than a shared sense of suffering amongst oppressed peoples, or attachment to some vaguely transnational political ideology—bolshevism in the 1920s, communism or nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, anticolonialism and socialism in the 1950s and 1960s—remains the best single explanation for Irish republicanism’s eclectic range of ideological bedfellows.