A war that stopped a war? The necropolitics of (Northern) Ireland’s First World War centenary

Abstract

The recent ‘recovery’ of First World War memory in Ireland has been much discussed and widely celebrated. What has been represented as Ireland’s centennial reacquaintance with its Great War heritage has been framed by a wider ‘Decade of Centenaries’: a policy construct through which a more reconciliatory approach to commemorating the violent events which gave birth to the two states on the island of Ireland has been promoted. The Decade has seen the ascendance of joint British–Irish First World War commemorations, and attempts have been made to use commemoration to bridge the ‘communal’ divide between unionism and nationalism. In this article, I interrogate this new commemorative dispensation and the assumptions that underwrite it. I argue that the reconciliatory reorientation of commemoration in Ireland during the Decade of Centenaries is based on an ethically contradictory and militaristic reframing of the First World War as ‘a war that stopped a war’. Eliding the ways in which the War has actually long been remembered in nationalist Ireland, this reframing is representative of and acts to reinforce the wider anti-political project in which the British and Irish states have been jointly involved since the advent of the peace process. Arguing that the (necro)politics of Ireland’s First World War centenary have represented the slaughter of Irishmen on Flanders’ fields as a symbolic sacrifice for a particular, neoliberal ‘peace’ in (Northern) Ireland, I will conclude that the limits of this project have been radically revealed by recent political events which have called its future hegemony into doubt.