Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part 1 Democracy in Ireland: Theoretical and Empirical Problems
- Part 2 Patterns of Crisis Resolution in the Irish Free State, 1922–1932
- 4 The Army Mutiny and Normative Political Challenges
- 5 The Boundary Commission Crisis and the Development of Strategies of Political Efficacy
- 6 The Limits of Effective Rule: The Assassination of Kevin O'Higgins and Its Aftermath
- Part 3 The Character of Irish Democracy
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - The Army Mutiny and Normative Political Challenges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part 1 Democracy in Ireland: Theoretical and Empirical Problems
- Part 2 Patterns of Crisis Resolution in the Irish Free State, 1922–1932
- 4 The Army Mutiny and Normative Political Challenges
- 5 The Boundary Commission Crisis and the Development of Strategies of Political Efficacy
- 6 The Limits of Effective Rule: The Assassination of Kevin O'Higgins and Its Aftermath
- Part 3 The Character of Irish Democracy
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction: the political context of crisis politics
The following three chapters will examine a major political crisis in the Free State during its first decade. As I will argue, these crises revealed the kinds of political obstacles – and how they changed over time – that the political leaders had to confront and overcome in their efforts to construct a modern, democratic order. Most broadly, these crises were political expressions of the competing cultural currents in Irish society. Especially in the early part of the decade, challenges to political order were understood and typically expressed through these cultural prisms. As I suggested in Chapter 3, these cultural strains became institutionalized through the constitutional drafting process. As I indicated, the result was paradoxical. Rather than solving the problem of contending cultural currents, the Constitution only amalgamated them into a single document. As the decade progressed, as the next chapters will detail, challenges to the political regime were less frequently expressed in broad cultural terms and increasingly in constitutional, even public policy, terms.
But I will argue that the shift in political language over the decade cannot be interpreted as the result of decreasing cultural opposition. Rather, different understandings of the Irish government continued to animate political life, but as the regime became increasingly adept at demonstrating its political control and authority, and as it appropriated greater political resources on its own behalf, political discourse became less general and confrontational.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Building Democracy in IrelandPolitical Order and Cultural Integration in a Newly Independent Nation, pp. 95 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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