Document Actions

KN: Orphans of History The Minority Question in Inter-War Ireland

When

Nov 26, 2025 from 10:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Philosophikum II, Karl-Glöckner-Straße 21, Haus H, Raum 205

Add event to calendar

iCal

 

ETRG Religion in the Study of Culture am International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Kooperation mit: Akzentbereich des FB 04 „Theologie(n), Diversität, Gesellschaft“, Evangelischer Bund Hessen e.V. und Interdisciplinary Network „Protestantism as a Minority Religion“.

In common with most other inter-war new nation states, the two Irish jurisdictions which emerged from Ireland’s Partition between 1920 and 1922 struggled with the issue of boundaries and borders. Externally, partition was controversial and the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland made no obvious sense. Internally, each of the two ‘Irelands’ contained alienated and restless minorities, defined primarily by religious affiliation and the alleged link between religion and national allegiance. The persecution of Jews in central and eastern Europe and the Zionist drive towards Mandatory Palestine added a further dimension of complexity, not least because many of the British officials and soldiers in Palestine were Irish veterans, traumatised by the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21 and eager to show their ability to establish authority and control over a territory troubled by civil unrest and guerrilla warfare. This paper explores some of these issues and places them in the context of the wider question of whether a ‘nation state’ could survive the challenge of internal diversity and organised ethnic dissent.  The paper will also raise some wider theoretical implications of the minority question and its relationship with democratic nation states.

Eugenio Biagini is an alumnus of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He first came up to Cambridge (at Sidney Sussex) in 1985, before becoming a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College in 1987. After spending two years at the Department of History of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he became an Assistant Professor of Modern British History at Princeton. In 1996 he came back to Cambridge as a College Lecturer at Robinson College. He then became a University Lecturer in 1998 and a Reader in 2000. In 2008 he moved back to his old College, Sidney Sussex, in 2008. In 2011 he was appointed to a personal chair and he is now Professor of Modern and Contemporary History.

His research focuses on the social, economic and political history of democracy. He has written on Gladstonian liberalism and the Italian Risorgimento, but Ireland is his main area of research. His British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007) examined the way the Irish Home Rule campaigns affected the making of democracy in the two islands. He has recently published (with Daniel Mulhall), The Shaping of Modern Ireland (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2016) and he is currently editing (with Mary Daly), The Cambridge Social History of Ireland since 1740 (Cambridge, Cambridge University press, 2016). His current research focuses on the history of religious and ethnic minorities in twentieth-century Ireland, in a comparative perspective. He focuses on the challenge of nation building, the redefinition of ‘public interest’, civil liberties and ‘the constitution’ in deeply divided societies.