We’ve talked a lot over the course of the semester about the establishment and maintenance of transnational and global connections, but recently during my research for my project I have come across cases of the opposite: the rejection, dismissal and manipulation of such connections.
Indeed, in Northern Ireland, the most vocal loyalist community, led by Reverend Dr. Ian Paisley, actively denied any real connections between the discrimination against African Americans in the Deep South of the United States and that experienced by the Catholic population in Northern Ireland, instead suggesting that such comparisons were fabricated by the Northern Irish civil rights movement leaders ‘in order to dupe ordinary Catholics out onto the streets in a deep conspiracy concocted by the remnants of the IRA and agents of international communism’.[1] (Indeed, he was rejecting one transnational connection that supplied favourable connotations to the Northern Irish movement, given widespread public support for the US civil rights movement, in favour of another that instilled fear and doubt about their politics and motives.) Paisley and his followers, in what has subsequently been recognised as an exaggeration of the threat they posed to loyalist hegemony, recognised the Northern Irish civil rights movement as an overtly nationalist plot that was only employing nonviolence as a guise for their true militant republicanism, and thus Northern Ireland had to be protected from their actions.
In this week’s reading by Katrin Steffen & Martin Kohlrausch, we can see another example of the detrimental effects and limits of transnational connections, largely as a result of politics. Jan Czochralski, in his work in both Poland and Germany, participated in a transnational network of experts that, when it became embroiled in the politics of the period, became unfeasible, and Czochralski’s specific circumstances of working across enemy lines resulted in accusations of aiding the enemy in their production of materials for warfare. Czochralski was criticised on account of his transnational connections with Germany, at a time when Germany were the political and military enemy of Poland, much like the Northern Irish civil rights movement was vilified by Paisley and his followers as a result of their supposed communist and republican motives, beliefs contrary to the contemporary political structure.
[1] Brian Kelly, ‘Transatlantic Affinities: King, Non-Violent Civil Disobedience and the Failure of Civil Rights Agitation in Northern Ireland’, p. 12