The End of Neutrality is the End of Peace

The Irish government are planning to hold a series of “public forums” on the question of Ireland’s military neutrality later this year. These forums and their expert panels have been given the reins on this issue, rather than a Citizens’ Assembly, because the Irish government has a preconceived answer to that question it wants our political processes to arrive at. I am not saying these public forums will necessarily be “rigged” in some way, per se, just acknowledging what anyone can see, but no one in support of ending Irish neutrality would ever admit: that they were very blatantly chosen in lieu of a Citizens’ Assembly because given the two options on the table, one is more likely to produce a more supportive result for their preferred future vision of Irish foreign policy. I am 100% confident that is the case, for the simple reason that support for maintaining Irish neutrality remains consistently high and support for Ireland joining NATO remains consistently low, so even if a panel is only composed of an equal number of experts for and against neutrality – however expert is defined! – it’s still more likely to produce a result favourable to the government than a group drawn from the citizenry. I don’t think that means these forums aren’t worth engaging with; if anything I encourage everyone in the country to look into the process for making submissions to them whenever that’s announced and do whatever else you can to fight for maintaining our neutrality.

I want to explain why I believe so strongly in Irish neutrality and why I think it should not only be maintained, but deepened. Luckily for my purposes, a good way to explain it is to look at the major recurring bit of debates on Irish neutrality: World War II, and therefore the Holocaust. That Ireland should not have been neutral during World War II, because it meant being neutral on the Holocaust, is the thought-terminating cliché of people who want to end Irish neutrality. It is the assumption on which the rest of their worldview stands, at least for those who aren’t weird maniacs who just love war for some reason. If we shouldn’t have been neutral during World War II, which is the same thing as being neutral about the Holocaust, then we shouldn’t be neutral about anything else that can be presented as some combination of World War II (the only war with almost universally agreed-upon good guys and bad guys) and the Holocaust (the archetypal genocide). These are very easy things to make people believe, especially because war is already a form of mass murder by definition. It’s easy to present a war as an atrocity because war is an atrocity. I defer as ever to Hawkeye on M*A*S*H:

“War is war and Hell is hell, and of the two, war is a lot worse … There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. But war is chock full of them: little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”

Proponents of ending Irish neutrality love to accuse their opponents of being idealists whose values might seem right on paper, but not in the real world, where real people’s lives are at stakes. They say it is morally unserious to cling to our neutrality when people all over the world are dying every day in war and genocide, and we could be doing something, anything to make that stop faster, and maybe even end with a more just outcome. But they have it backwards. They are the idealists whose values seem right on paper, but not in the real world, where real people’s lives are at stakes. It is morally unserious to yearn to participate in war if you weigh its cost to human welfare fairly. War by its very nature does not save lives, it ruins and ends them. It is a moral abomination that multiplies suffering and death, and we should always prefer there were not war than there were. That doesn’t mean that in all cases every person should always make the choice to preserve peace and avoid war. If another country says they’re going to invade your country unless you accept their rule, I’m not saying it’s a personal moral failure to refuse to accept their conditions just to avert a war. In fact, the problem with this entire point of view is that it rests on the mistaken assumption that the only meaningful question in ethics is how to make the right choice in a given situation, and such choices are the only legitimate way to think about how to be a good person, which is what ethics is all about. I call it “protagonistic thinking” because it’s a way of thinking that always imagines you as the main character of all moral situations and it pisses me off.

But before I go off on that, I do want to address a few other problems with how opponents of Irish neutrality use the Holocaust as a rhetorical device. First off, I just think it’s a cheap way to talk about the Holocaust, especially because, as polling analyst Harry McEvansoneya once wrote on Twitter:

“Ireland’s shame in WWII was a hostile attitude toward, and limited openness to accepting, Jewish refugees.

Neutral nations can play a powerful role as safe havens; that is where Ireland failed, badly

Military involvement would have achieved far less at far greater cost.”

This simple point highlights something that should be obvious: there is almost never just one right choice that everyone should make in a given situation. Your choice of job is morally consequential, but people don’t generally believe that there is a correct moral decision that everyone should make about what career to pursue. We understand instinctively that the functioning and flourishing of our society depends on diverse varieties of labour that produce a plurality of goods, especially social goods that benefit everyone. We all know we need people to make and maintain roads, so no one thinks you’re failing to live up to your moral obligations if you do that for a living instead of being a cancer researcher. There is generally more than one way to skin a cat, ethically speaking. Whether or not to enter the war was not the only important moral choice on the table during World War II, and it is not the choice that put the Irish government on the wrong side of history during the Holocaust.

We are a country still yet to recover populationwise from a famine that occurred almost two hundred years ago, killing a million and sending another abroad, many of them as refugees, and it truly baffles me that any Irish person would ever turn away a refugee who came to us seeking safe haven, then and now. That’s why it’s such a cheap argument: they’re allegedly the ones taking the Holocaust seriously, but they’re not asking what we should have done for its victims, they’re asking whether we should have joined the war or not. They’re not thinking about the victims and what we owed them, they’re thinking about themselves and whether they would make the “right choice”. It’s an extremely narrow way to think about how to achieve moral goods, one that limits the scope of ethical inquiry to basically just the trolley problem – should I pull this lever or shouldn’t I? – instead of asking which social, economic and political arrangements promote moral goods and which impede them. I think serving as a safe haven for refugees is an obvious moral good that neutral countries can and should provide in times of war, but I also think increasing the number of neutral countries is essential to the pursuit of peace more generally.

To some extent, that’s almost definitional: the likelihood of war will obviously go down if more and more countries refuse to go to war. But, more practically, neutral countries are important because they can serve special roles as honest brokers in peace negotiations, which makes it easier for wars to come to an end, or as impartial observers who can investigate claims of war crimes and produce reliable, trustworthy conclusions because they don’t need to propagandise like participants in a war. They alone have the vantage point to report on, record, present and preserve the truth of its horrors, unencumbered by incentives to lie. I’m not saying that neutral countries currently do either of those things in all or most cases. If anything, they are both examples of the kind of proactive neutrality that Ireland could and should pursue in order to promote the cause of peace, instead of just avoiding war. More urgently, we need to stop allowing the US to fuel their planes at Shannon, and disclose any role the Irish state, including our national intelligence service, had (or has) in facilitating extraordinary rendition while we’re at it. Neutrality shouldn’t be about standing aside; it should be about standing up. We should be severing our ties with the US national security state and its allies, not deepening them. If the Irish ruling class succeeds in its ambition of fully shedding our neutrality, it will have overturned once and for all the only good thing every single Irish government has thus far more-or-less preserved. Whether it’s “just” participation in an EU army or full-on membership of NATO, any country that ceases to be neutral automatically makes the world a less stable and peaceful place for everyone. Anyone who would welcome that for Ireland – or any other country – is either a fool or a madman.