UK, was still considerably above the Irish average. Even for Catholics, Ulster was a better economic bet. Protestants, meanwhile, identified very strongly with the UK. This sentiment was by no means reciprocated by the rest of Britain, which thought little of Northern Ireland (when it thought of it at all). The old industries of Ulster, like those of the rest of the UK, were in decline by the end of the 1960s, and it was already clear to planners in London that the overwhelmingly Protestant blue-collar workforce there had an uncertain future. But beyond this, it is fair to say that the British authorities had not given Ulster serious thought for many decades.
The IRA had declined to a marginal political sect, denouncing the Irish Republic as illegitimate because incomplete while reiterating its ‘revolutionary’ aspiration to forge a different Ireland, radical and united. The IRA’s wooly, anachronistic rhetoric had little appeal to a younger generation of recruits (including the seventeen-year- old, Belfast-born Gerry Adams, who joined in 1965) more interested in action than doctrine and who formed their own organization, the clandestine, ‘Provisional’ IRA.[203] The ‘Provos’, recruited mainly from Derry and Belfast, emerged just in time to benefit from a wave of civil rights demonstrations across the North, demanding long overdue political and civil rights for Catholics from the Ulster government in Stormont Castle and encountering little but political intransigence and police batons for their efforts.
The ‘Troubles’ that were to take over Northern Irish—and to some extent British—public life for the next three decades were sparked by street battles in Derry following the traditional Apprentice Boys’ March in July 1969, aggressively commemorating the defeat of the Jacobite and Catholic cause 281 years before. Faced with growing public violence and demands from Catholic leaders for London to intervene, the UK government sent in the British Army and took over control of policing functions in the six counties. The army, recruited largely in mainland Britain, was decidedly less partisan and on the whole less brutal than the local police. It is thus ironic that its presence provided the newly formed Provisional IRA with its core demand: that the British authorities and their troops should leave Ulster, as a first stage towards re-uniting the island under Irish rule.
The British did not leave. It is not clear how they could have left. Various efforts through the 1970s to build inter-community confidence and allow the province to run its own affairs fell foul of suspicion and intransigence on both sides. Catholics, even if they had no liking for their own armed extremists, had good precedent for mistrusting promises of power-sharing and civic equality emanating from the Ulster Protestant leadership. The latter, always reluctant to make real concessions to the Catholic minority, were now seriously fearful of the intransigent gunmen of the Provisionals. Without the British military presence the province would have descended still further into open civil war.
The British government was thus trapped. At first London was sympathetic to Catholic pressure for reforms; but following the killing of a British soldier in February 1971 the government introduced internment without trial and the situation deteriorated rapidly. In January 1972, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in the streets of Derry. In that same year 146 members of the security forces and 321 civilians were killed in Ulster, and nearly five thousand people injured. Buoyed up by a new generation of martyrs and the obstinacy of its opponents, the Provisional IRA mounted what was to become a thirty-year campaign, in the course of which it bombed, shot and maimed soldiers and civilians in Ulster and across mainland Britain. It made at least one attempt to assassinate the British Prime Minister. Even if the British authorities had wanted to walk away from Ulster (as many mainland voters might have wished), they could not. As a referendum of March 1973 showed and later polls confirmed, an overwhelming majority of the people of Ulster wished to maintain their ties to Britain.[204]
The IRA campaign did not unite Ireland. It did not remove the British from Ulster. Nor did it destabilize British politics, though the assassination of politicians and public figures (notably Lord Mountbatten, former Viceroy of India and god-father of the Prince of Wales) genuinely shocked public opinion on both sides of the Irish Sea. But the Irish ‘Troubles’ further darkened an already gloomy decade in British public life and contributed to the ‘ungovernability’ thesis being touted at the time, as well as to the end of the carefree optimism of the 1960s. By the time the Provisional IRA—and the Protestant paramilitary groups that had emerged in its wake—finally came to the negotiating table, to secure constitutional arrangements that the British government might have been pleased to concede almost from the outset, 1,800 people had been killed and one Ulster resident in five had a family member killed or wounded in the fighting.
Against this background, the other ‘pathologies’ of 1970s Europe were small indeed, though they contributed to the widespread atmosphere of unease. A self-styled ‘Angry Brigade’, purportedly acting on behalf of the unrepresented unemployed, planted bombs around London in 1971. Francophone separatists in the Swiss Jura, modeling their tactics on those of the Irish, rioted in 1974 at their enforced incorporation into the (German- speaking) canton of Bern. Crowds of rioters in Liverpool, Bristol and the Brixton district of London battled with police over control of ‘no-go’ inner-city slums.
In one key or another, all such protests and actions were, as I have suggested, pathologies of politics: however extreme their form, their goals were familiar and their tactics instrumental. They were trying to achieve something and would—by their own account—have desisted if their demands were met. ETA, the IRA and their imitators were terrorist organizations; but they were not irrational. In due course most of them ended up negotiating with their enemies, in the hope of securing their objectives if only in part. But such considerations were never of interest to protagonists of the second violent challenge of the times.
In most of Western Europe, the airy radical theorems of the 1960s dissipated harmlessly enough. But in two countries in particular they metamorphosed into a psychosis of self-justifying aggression. A small minority of erstwhile student radicals, intoxicated by their own adaptation of Marxist dialectics, set about ‘revealing’ the ‘true face’ of repressive tolerance in Western democracies. If the parliamentary regime of capitalist interests were pushed hard enough, they reasoned, it would shed the cloak of legality and show its true face. Confronted with the truth about its oppressors, the proletariat—hitherto ‘alienated’ from its own interestand victim of ‘false consciousness’ about its situation—would take up its proper place on the barricades of class warfare.
Such a summary gives too much credit to the terrorist underground of the 1970s—and too little. Most of the young men and women swept up in it, however familiar they were with the justificatory vocabulary of violence, played little part in its formulation. They were the foot soldiers of terrorism. On the other hand, especially in West Germany, the emotional energy invested in their hatred of the Federal Republic drew on sources deeper and darker than the mal-adapted rhetorical gymnastics of nineteenth-century radicalism. The urge to bring the architecture of security and stability crashing down on the heads of their parents’ generation was the extreme expression of a more widespread skepticism, in the light of the recent past, about the local credibility of pluralist democracy. It was not by chance, therefore, that ‘revolutionary terror’ took its most menacing form in Germany and Italy.
The link between extra-parliamentary politics and outright violence first emerged in Germany as early as April 1968, when four young radicals—among them Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin—were arrested on suspicion of burning two department stores in Frankfurt. Two years later Baader escaped from prison in the course of an armed raid planned and led by Ulrike Meinhof. She and Baader then issued their ‘Concept City Guerrilla Manifesto’, announcing the formation of a ‘
Between 1970 and 1978, the RAF and its ancillary offshoots pursued a strategy of deliberately random terror, assassinating soldiers, policemen and businessmen, holding up banks and kidnapping mainstream politicians. In addition to killing 28 people and wounding a further 93 in the course of bombings and shootings in these years, they took 162 hostages and carried out over 30 bank robberies—partly to finance their organization, partly to advertise their presence. In the early years they also targeted American Army bases in West Germany, killing and injuring a number of soldiers, notably in the late spring of 1972.
In their peak year of 1977, the RAF kidnapped and subsequently executed Hans Martin Schleyer, the chairman of Daimler Benz and President of the West German Federation of Industries, and assassinated both Siegfried Buback, the West German Attorney General, and Jurgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank. But this was to be their swansong. Already, in May 1976, Meinhof (captured in 1972) had been found dead in her Stuttgart prison cell. She had apparently hung herself, though rumors persisted that she had been executed by the state. Baader, seized in a shoot-out in Frankfurt in 1972, was in prison serving a life sentence for murder when he, too, was found dead in his cell on October 18th 1977, on the same day as Gudrun Ensslin and another imprisoned terrorist. Their underground organization persisted into the eighties, albeit much reduced: in August 1981 it
