Peace in our time
At the stroke of midnight last night, a momentous occasion in the history of this country occurred, as the United Kingdom’s military campaign in Northern Ireland was officially wound down for the last time.
Operation Banner was launched in 1969 to protect Catholics from increasingly aggressive Protestant paramilitaries, and, at its peak involved over 30,000 British soldiers. Even today, 5,000 soldiers are stationed in Ulster. Lasting 38 years, it is the longest military operation in the history of the British Army. Conducted at the cost of 763 servicemen killed and over 6,100 wounded, it is also the most deadly since the Korean War.
Yet, what distinguished Operation Banner from the preceding conflicts of the British Army was that it was an operation not against foreigners, but against British people. The operation was not primarily to thwart external threats (although many Republican terrorists did use the Republic as a safe haven), but to instil and maintain civil order. And, that was exactly what was fundamentally wrong about it.
The late King … did endeavour to subvert … the laws and liberties of this kingdom … by raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law … which [is] utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm.
What’s all this then? Well, since you ask, it’s the Bill of Rights 1689, which, like Magna Carta almost 500 years before, guarantees the basic rights of the people. It clearly states, in black and white, that it is against our basic rights to have the state maintain an army on operation in this country. Since it refers to the basic rights (hence its name) of man living in an enlightened society, the Bill of Rights certainly applies consistently across the country (even though it, like Magna Carta, originally applied to England and Wales only). And that includes Northern Ireland.
Similarly, as it refers to rights, it really doesn’t matter one way or another whether Parliament says the state can wage war against its civilians or not. After all, to misquote Louis XIV of France, Parliament is the state. At the most, it is the part of the state that seeks to legitimise the actions of the other parts. However, true rights are inalienable, and no one branch of the government can legitimise any actions of another branch that impinges upon the rights of man.
What was going on in Ulster in the 1960s was intolerable. Clearly, the minority Catholics were being oppressed, and threatened existentially in a way that no people can tolerate. However, the way for the state to combat that was not to garrison a standing army in the province and use it in active operations against fellow British people. The role of the army must be kept fundamentally separate from the police - the latter to defend liberty from internal threats, the former to defend liberty from external threats. Otherwise, the state may be tempted to employ the resources of the armed forces against its own people: a cataclysmic prospect in the age of industrialised warfare.
The Troubles ought to have been countered by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the predecessors to today’s Police Service of Northern Ireland. The fact that today, after 38 years, the police have been restored as the rightful authority in the province is not just a reinforcement of the progress towards peace made in Northern Ireland since 1969, but a reinforcement of the progress towards liberty made in the whole of our country since 1689.
Categories: armed forces, Bill of Rights 1689, Northern Ireland, Magna Carta
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Arthurian Legend said,
August 2, 2007 @ 10:23 pm
You seem to be slightly confused in part of your argument.
The part of the Magna Carta that you quote makes clear that the suberversion of the law of the country was occassioned by the keeping of a standing army in a time of peace without the consent of Parliament. But you then appear to admit (implicitly) that Parliament did give such consent in the case of Northern Ireland, but that that consent was illegitimate based on natural law/positive rights grounds.
But Magna Carta itself is a document issued by the Monarch (State) and identifies the legitimacy of actions as conditional upon the consent of the (same) State (or the absence of any prohibition), not by reference to some abstract principle of natural law . Logically, you can’t use the Magna Carta as the very basis for your attack on the stationing of troops in Northern Ireland and then dismiss the very legal reasoning on which the Magna Carta is based.
(This leaves aside of course the fact that Magna Carta is not the law of the land any more and so in principle irrelevant to the question of the legality of the troops’ presence).
Oli Cooper said,
August 2, 2007 @ 11:23 pm
There was confusion of what I wrote, so I will clarify.
The legality or otherwise of their presence is somewhat irrelevant to my argument. Since, under the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty, the organ that deems actions legal or otherwise is Parliament. Parliament is an organ of the state, and is not therefore in a fit position to determine whether the actions of the state itself are legitimate, even if it is fit to determine whether they are legal.
It is also true that Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were issued by the state. Therefore, you argue, I must deem *them* to be illegitimate as well. However, I am a minarchist, not an anarchist (I would argue that anarcho-capitalisists are living with a false understanding of what it means to develop a system of morality, but that’s a story for another day). The result is that I do recognise that there are actions by the state that are legitimate.
However, the state’s insistence that it can grant rights is not such an action. The Bill of Rights does not grant British (or, rather, English) people the right not to have an army kept in their midst. What they do is act as monuments to the state’s recognition of those rights, and to the state’s recognition of its role in protecting those rights.
I use Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights in my attack, because the state has been hypocritical. Not because the state’s original statement of our rights was benevolent, honestly-derived, or well-observed (which it wasn’t), but because the state made it clear that there were lines that it would not cross. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that most parts of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights don’t apply in law any more, because the the state has recognised its own folly, and any retraction of such a statement is no more a legitimisation than simply to make a statement of action at all.
When the state recognises its own illegitimacy in such actions, it is beheld by all, and serves as a monument that can never be allowed to be demolished. The fact that, for 38 years, British soldiers were deployed against fellow Britons proves that that monument has been eroded, and the principles of state action within this country eroded.
Squander Two said,
August 6, 2007 @ 6:37 pm
The more fundamental problem with your argument is the phrase “in time of peace”. That is not a description of Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
The Troubles are also a slightly unusual case when it comes to defining “the British people”. The people the army spent most of their time fighting absolutely insisted that they were not British — and, indeed, the Irish Government regard the Northern Irish as entitled to Irish passports. The British state said that they were British. When you define them as “fellow Britons”, you are forcing the ascendancy of the state’s definition of them over their own.
> The Troubles ought to have been countered by the Royal Ulster Constabulary
It’s very easy to say that, but just what sort of death rate do you think a modern police force should put up with? Bearing in mind that police officers are citizens too, and they didn’t sign up to be part of a war, what right do you think the state have to send them into one?
Of course, one of the advantages of calling in the army is that they can one day leave again, as they just have. The police are with us to stay. To win the Troubles, the RUC would have needed exactly what the army had: tanks, machine guns, deep-cover spies, assassins, combat-zone training, utter ruthlessness. If you think that a police force, having got all those things, is likely to give them, you have a lot more faith in the benevolence of the state than I do.
Oli Cooper said,
August 7, 2007 @ 3:21 pm
The distinction between an internal security crisis and a war is not a matter of severity. They are fundamentally different animals: the former is posed by the internal threat, and the latter by an external threat.
Now, I grant you, there is a modicum of counter-intuition in that distinction. However, that is the distinction that there is. The army’s role is to defend against external threats (and, lest we forget, to parade outside Horse Guards and Buckingham Palace to lure in Japanese tourists). That is the responsibility that we vest in them, and that is the only reason that we ought to tolerate them holding the power that they do. If we were made aware that the state had fully discretionary power of deploying soldiers to deal with US, there is no way that I could tolerate them spending tens of billions of pounds on increasingly-advanced weaponry to deploy against me, and I’m sure the same is true of most libertarians.
The police being here to stay is a red herring, because so too is the army. If the army is given carte blanche to deal with domestic threats, it might as well be deployed on the streets all the time. In the naval tradition, the concept of a ‘Fleet in Being’ deters other countries from using the sea for its own purposes. Similarly, the concept of an ‘Army in Being’ deters the people from using their own country for their own purposes. Unless the rules are very well defined, and constitutionally bound as tightly as possible, that Army in Being can only prevent legitimate protest and civil disobedience against the presumptive authority of the state. The state’s actions become, as libertarians must always fear they are, backed up by the power of the gun.
The first point, I believe, is just a matter of semantics, and, by unravelling that, ties in neatly with the distinction between internal and external threats. ‘British people’ doesn’t mean ethnicity (I have no time for nationalism, as no true libertarian can), but the state under which those people must live. Unlike the government of the Republic of Ireland (which, until the Good Friday Agreement, laid claim to Northern Ireland under its constitution), the government of the United Kingdom considers the people of the province to be British, and have the same rights as other Britons.
If that is the case, they must, afford them the rights that they would grant people in Berkshire or Perthshire, by recognising the distinction between internal and external threats. This, in turn, ties to the point made in the previous comment of mine. If the state informs us of the rules by which it acts and governs, and they are tolerable, they develop a certain obligation to uphold them. The state cannot justify maintaining army by citing the existence of uppity, vertically-challenged, Corsicans, and then use them to fight the same people that gave their consent to the original justification.