This is an excellent book, based on careful analysis of the records of the Orange Order, down to the minutes of local meetings, together with sophisticated quantitative analysis. It is more than a history of the Orange Order—although it is a good history—it is also an intervention in the literature on unionism and Orangeism. Its most important contribution is its description and analysis of the internal divisions and debates within the Orange Order.
Eric Kaufmann outlines the internal divisions within the order, the ousting of the traditionalist patrician elites by the populists in the 1950s and 1960s, and the concomitant strengthening of what he calls the “rebel” strand within Orangeism: that strand ready to protect ethnocommunal interests through challenge to the Unionist and British government. It was opposed by “traditionalists,” no longer patricians but often rural or living in the border counties, deferential to government, and also willing on occasion to take a liberal line.
One of the first battles described concerns the expulsion from the order of two liberal unionist politicians for attending a Catholic funeral in 1967. They were defended by a “traditionalist” current in Orangeism that was willing to accept change in the 1960s: not just politicians but also Captain O. W. J. Henderson, director of the UTV and owner of the News Letter, and a solid bloc of unionists and Orangemen willing to move slowly. They were defeated by the rebels, including a young Rev. Martin Smyth, who later became part of the 1980s and 1990s unionist establishment. If there is any skepticism about the existence of divisions in unionism—and there should not be after recent work by Mulholland, Walker, Patterson, and others—this book shows decisively that they existed in the heart of Orangeism itself and continue to exist up to the present.
Battles proliferated, with the order playing an important role in checking government reform programs in 1970–71, not least the impact of local government. Some of the flavor of the tight networking that characterized the Stormont period is provided here, in the role of local organic intellectuals, for example, the Reverend James Johnston who used the order as a platform to put forward closely argued objections to government policy on the basis that it would affect the sectarian balance on education boards and mobilized the power of the order to oppose this. This dense set of networks joining different levels of civil society and state organizations continued through the period of violence, with Orangemen (especially the rural “traditionalists”) joining the security forces in droves.
After 1985, marching became the battleground of Orangeism versus republicanism, Orangeism versus the state, and rebels versus traditionalists within Orangeism. Kaufmann shows how the “rebel,” ethnic, sectarian “Spirit of Drumcree” movement stopped the liberal-traditionalist advance, “clipping the wings” (201) of the liberal education committee. Change occurred. Particularly after 1998 the order began to participate in the new structures, and it adopted the new pluralist and multiculturalist language, supporting the Civic Forum in a new “charm offensive” (239–40). Free Presbyterians moved into the order, while the order moved closer to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In the end, the Orange Order distanced itself from the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), before the UUP—despite the long debates—succeeded in distancing itself from the order. But—although this is beyond the bounds of Kaufmann's study—the DUP itself is changing. Meanwhile, membership of the order declined, on Kaufmann's account for everyday reasons associated with growing territorial mobility.
The narrative raises important political questions, and Kaufmann gives us pointers rather than answers. Why were the moderates defeated in the 1960s? Why did the “silent minority” (114) stay silent through the 1970s? What of the division in the present? Part of the weakness of the liberal current has to be explained, in my view, by the dense networking that connects involvement in state institutions, sectarian interests, and local loyalties and limits the scope of liberal principle among those unwilling to break these social bonds. Kaufmann calls this ethnicity (2–3): I am not sure that the label helps analysis. One of his interviewees uses the ethnic terminology of “my tribe” (133–35), but Kaufmann tells us little about his interviews, even how many there were. Is such “tribalist” imagery common among the Orange “brethren” (a religious as much as an ethnic term)? Did it percolate into local Orange meetings?
Kaufmann positions the rebel-traditionalist division within Orangeism within a broader Ulster British versus Ulster loyalist division: on his analysis, Orangemen are all loyalists, and none of them belong to the Ulster British civic unionist strand of the 1980s and 1990s. He uses postcode analysis as well as survey data to show the class, generational, and geographic breakdown, with rebels concentrated in Belfast, Antrim, and North Down, the traditionalist heartland in the south and west. Rebels tend to be young (thus a certain taming of the rebel character of Smyth and Molyneaux by the 1980s and 1990s). On any measure, however, Kaufmann shows that civic unionists are thin on the ground: compromise is more likely to come, on his picture, through the liberal traditionalists.
Kaufmann is surely right to divide Ulster loyalty into its more rebellious and its more deferential components. His term, “traditionalists,” well captures the old-fashioned, rural, often religious, and abstemious character and modest and somewhat deferential aspect of this section of Orangemen. It may not sufficiently do justice to their liberalism, which, where it exists, appears to have been more than deference to contemporary norms: some of these local farmers and clergy show that one can be a principled liberal without being a cosmopolitan or a civic nationalist. Were traditionalists themselves split on liberal-nonliberal lines? Kaufmann's typology comes under some strain when we arrive at the present, when the establishment against whom the Spirit of Drumcree rebels—not least Rev. Martin Smyth—were themselves young rebels in the past (162–63, 177). Smyth has metamorphosed into a traditionalist, while retaining a resistance to liberalism. He is certainly a different sort of traditionalist than Bingham and Kennaway, who have moved to a more principled liberalism. Perhaps we should think of the Ulster British and Ulster loyalist categories as overlapping circles, with the liberal traditionalists moving into the Ulster British category, although I certainly did not expect to find them at the heart of the Orange Order.
There are a few minor mistakes in the early part of the book; for example, Cahal Daly is named as Cahan Daly (175, 360). This, however, is a minor flaw in an engaging and high quality book.
