Manchester University Press - Friends and enemies

This history of Anglo-American efforts to overturn Ireland's neutrality policy during the Second World War adds complexity to the grand narrative of the Western Alliance against the Axis Powers, exploring relatively unexamined emotional, personalised, and gendered politics that underlay policymaking and alliance relations. Friends and enemies combines the methodologies of diplomatic history through its close reliance on archival documentation with attention to new theoretical understandings regarding the roles played by personal friendships and enmities and competing masculine ideologies among national leaders. Including, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Eamon de Valera, and their close foreign policy advisers in London, Washington DC and Dublin, as they constructed national identities and defined their nations' special relationships in time of war.

Reviews

'Takes a novel approach, applying a gender analysis to a well-worn subject.'
Mervyn O'Driscoll, University College Cork

'A good history of World War II from three perspectives: the Irish, British, and American. Garner shows not only how Ireland fit into Big power relations, but how the small country proved to have a seminal role in many issues in the world war.'
Thomas W Zeiler, University of Colorado, Boulder

'Drawing on archival research and recent scholarship on the impact of gendered and national identities on leaders' relationships and international relations, Garner (Empire State College, SUNY) examines the efforts of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enlist neutral Ireland-led by Prime Minister Éamon de Valera-in the Allied cause during WW II. She focuses on how Churchill and Roosevelt's "fraternal friendship," based on masculine ideology, influenced their campaigns to rally their nations to war against the Axis powers and to sway de Valera, who remained firmly committed to a foreign policy grounded in his own masculine assertion of Ireland's national sovereignty and of Irish, not British or American, interests throughout the war. Garner also describes the relationships and activities of the leaders' foreign policy advisers in Dublin, British Representative Sir John Maffey, Irish Cabinet Secretaries Joseph Walshe and Frank Aiken, and US Minister to Ireland David Gray, as well as Gray's friend and confidante, American war correspondent Helen Kirkpatrick, whose reporting conveyed her pro-British sympathy and hostility toward Irish neutrality to her readers and radio audiences. This study, which blends diplomatic history and gender and national identity theory in a coherent narrative, will interest students of WW II and 20th-century Ireland.

Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.'
A. H. Plunkett, University of Virginia, CHOICE (July 2022 Vol. 59 No. 11)

Introduction
1 Agreements Made, Pledges Broken: Europe in the 1930s
2 Neutral States in a World at War, September 1939 through May 1940
3 'Unstoppable' Germany, 'Unbeatable' Britain, June through December 1940
4 In Pursuit of America's Friendship, January through June 1941
5 British Friend, Irish Foe, July through December 1941
6 Efforts to 'Break the Backbone' of Irish Neutrality, January 1942 through December 1943
7 Eire, Neutral to the Bitter End, January 1944 through June 1945
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Author

Karen Garner is Professor of Historical Studies at SUNY Empire State University. She is a Fulbright Scholar and author of five academic books including Shaping a Global Women's Agenda: Women's NGOs and Global Governance, 1925-85, published by MUP in 2010