Going against the flow: Sinn Féin’s unusual Hungarian ‘roots’

David Haglund, Umut Korkut

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Can states as well as non-state political ‘actors’ learn from the history of cognate entities elsewhere in time and space, and if so how and when does this policy knowledge get ‘transferred’ across international borders? This article deals with this question, addressing a short-lived Hungarian ‘tutorial’ that, during the early twentieth century, certain policy elites in Ireland imagined might have great applicability to the political transformation of the Emerald Isle, in effect ushering in an era of political autonomy from the United Kingdom, and doing so via a ‘third way’ that skirted both the Scylla of parliamentary formulations aimed at securing ‘home rule’ for Ireland and the Charybdis of revolutionary violence. In the political agenda of Sinn Féin during its first decade of existence, Hungary loomed as a desirable political model for Ireland, with the party’s leading intellectual, Arthur Griffith, insisting that the means by which Hungary had achieved autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire in 1867 could also serve as the means for securing Ireland’s own autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This article explores what policy initiatives Arthur Griffith thought he saw in the Hungarian experience that were worthy of being ‘transferred’ to the Irish situation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)41-58
Number of pages18
JournalThe International History Review
Volume37
Issue number1
Early online date14 Feb 2014
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Keywords

  • Sinn Fein
  • Ireland
  • Hungary
  • political science

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