social movement radicalization: the case of the people's democracy in northern ireland

Social Movement Radicalization: The Case of the People's Democracy in Northern IrelandAuthor(s): Stephen W. BeachSource: The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer, 1977), pp. 305-318Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Midwest Sociological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4105836 .

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The Sociological Quarterly 18 (Summer 1977): 305-318

Social Movement Radicalization: the Case of the People's Democracy in Northern Ireland*

Stephen W. Beach, University of Wyoming

Most of existing literature assumes that social movement organizations will inevitably become more ideologically and tactically conservative over time. This paper presents a couterargument to this position, suggesting that many movement organizations can be shown to have grown more radical as they have developed. A definition of movement radicalization is constructed, and eight propositions concerning factors which seem to increase the likelihood that a movement organization will radicalize are presented. These factors include repressive action by the agents of social control, changes in the ideological and tactical orientations of the movement organization's constituency, codification of a radicalizing movement's ideology, a reduced likelihood of co-optation, certain aspects of the structural character of the larger society, weak internal controls over the group's members, and the presence of individual radical leaders. Each proposition is illustrated by reference to the career of a North Irish group known as the People's Democracy.

I

First-hand and journalistic accounts of contemporary social movement organizations frequently draw attention to a process termed radicalization. There is general agreement that groups such as SDS (cf. Sale, 1973; Adelson, 1972), SNCC (Forman, 1972), and the various components of the Gay Liberation Movement (Teal, 1971) have grown substantially more radical over time. Yet when we examine scholarly analyses of such movement organizations, we find relatively little consideration of this radicalization process.

There are essentially two reasons for this omission. First, contemporary sociologists have shown a marked preference for research into the determinants of movement formation rather than the study of dynamic processes of ongoing movement organizations such as radicalization. As a result, while we know a good deal about such matters as the types of strain and structural conduciveness factors which produce social movements, we understand relatively little about the ways in which movement organizations change once they are on the scene. Furthermore, some sociologists who have persisted in attempting to study movement organization life histories have proposed overly determinate theories with limited applicability (cf. Hopper, 1950; Zurcher and Kirkpatrick, 1976). Despite efforts by Zald and Ash (1966) and more recently by Oberschall (1973) and Wilson (1973) to promote the study of movement organization dynamics, the enterprise is still regarded by many as an unpromising one, and is occasionally

Reprints of this article may be obtained by writing Stephen W. Beach, Department of Sociology, University of Wyoming, University Station, Box 3293, Laramie, WY 82071.

*A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1974 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta. This research was funded in part by grants from the Duke University Commonwealth Studies Center and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. The assistance of Professors Jerry Lewis, Anthony Oberschall, Anthony Orum, John Wilson, and Mayer Zald in suggesting changes in earlier drafts of this paper is gratefully acknowledged.



306 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

characterized by the somewhat perjorative term, the "natural history approach" (Turner, 1970).

A second explanation of the scholarly tendency to ignore radicalization follows the wide acceptance of the Weberian model of organizational routinization as appropriate for the analysis of successful and persisting social movement organizations (Gerth and Mills, 1946). This model suggests that, in addition to generating an oligarchy and devoting increasing attention to organizational maintenance, developing movements will normally experience goal transformation in the direction of greater conservatism-"the accomodation of organization goals to the dominant societal consensus" (Zald and Ash, 1966:328). Radicalization, if it is acknowledged at all, is frequently viewed as an uncommon and abnormal phenomenon.'

This line of thought assumes implicitly that the differences between social movement organizations and formal organizations are minor, since the Weberian formulations were specifically developed with formal organizations in mind. But is this an entirely valid assumption? Without introducing an overly determinate dichotimization, it seems fairly evident that social movement organizations are usually analyzed as forms of collective behavior, dedicated to bringing about social change, whereas formal organizations generally have a greater commitment to the existing order, even if their objectives are change oriented." The leadership of movement organizations is usually either charismatic or ideological in character (Nyomarkay, 1967; Wilson, 1973), whereas that of formal organizations is prototypically rational-legal. Indeed, it is possible to argue that social movements only closely resemble formal organizations once they have become institutionalized, at which time they are in some ways no longer social movements at all. Naturally the NAACP and the Townsend Movement have experienced conservative goal transformation-these groups are institutionalized social movements and are best analyzed as examples of political pressure groups or some other type of post-movement formal organization. In the light of these observations, how valid is it to ignore the radicalization of many ongoing social movement organizations because this process is not provided for by the Weberian model as it has been interpreted by some contemporary scholars?

This paper reports some of the main findings of a participant observation study of a social movement organization in Northern Ireland which grew markedly more radical over its course of development..The analysis is directed primarily to one question: What are the factors which affect the likelihood that a particular movement organization at a particular point in time will or will not

'This should not be taken as implying that there are no case studies of radicalizing social movements or that the analytic literature takes no notice of the possibility of radicalization, but only as an indication that the dominant model is presently one of conservatization and routinization. While Coleman's (1957) classic study of community conflict does suggest that a process of radicalization or at least intensification of conflict is normal, this study can only be of limited utility to the present inquiry insofar as its unit of analysis is the community-based conflict rather than social movement organizations.

2On the other hand, there are undeniably some social phenomena which straddle the line between social movement organizations and formal organizations. For example. Pinard (1971) demonstrates that, although the Quebec Social Credit Party was in some ways a conventional political party, it also can be analyzed fruitfully from a social movement perspective.



Social Movement Radicalization 307

radicalize? However, before discussing the research it is necessary to develop at least a working definition of movement radicalization.

It may be argued that an individual's participation in a movement organization essentially takes place at two levels-the cognitive and the behavioral. In the realm of ideas, an individual accepts certain notions and perspectives which are shared with the other members of the group (and not with the population as a whole). In the realm of action, an individual undertakes certain activities which are designed to promote those aims which he and the group advocate. This observation suggests that there are essentially two dimensions of radicalization-the ideological and the strategic. An adequate definition must acknowledge that radicalization takes place on both levels.

It is evident that the notion of radicalization implies a comparison between the values held by members of a social movement and those advocated by some other group. I propose that the most useful perspective on the process is gained by providing that radicalization involves a comparison between a movement's changing values (both ideological and strategic) over time and the values advocated by the society in which the movement exists or, to be more specific, by the groups which hold a plurality of the social and political power in that society." Radicalization is occurring when these two sets of values are becoming less congruent-that is, when the ideological and strategic values held by the movement are growing increasingly offensive, threatening, and generally unacceptable to members of the larger society.

In sum, radicalization will be formally defined in this paper as

a change in one or more of the components of a social movement's ideology and/or a change in the strategies and tactics employed or advocated by the movement such that the total of the change or changes brings the movement into a condition of lesser congruence with the values and means which are presented as legitimate by the dominant sector of the society in which the movement is acting.

It should be noted that a process of radicalization may occur with regard either to religious or political values. Further, if a movement is primarily concerned with ideological values of a political nature, then radicalization may involve a change toward either the political left or right-what is significant is not the political character of the changing values so much as the shift away from congruence with the values which are held by the dominant sector of the larger society.

The social movement organization with which this paper is centrally concerned, the People's Democracy (PD), was founded in October 1968 by a group of students and recent graduates of Queen's University in Belfast as a means by which the students could work with other components of the Northern Irish civil rights movement toward the attainment of certain civil rights for the Catholic minority (Edwards, 1970). The initial aims of the P D were essentially the same as

-While in fact these societally approved values may also change over time, this change is usually much slower than transformations in movement values, and therefore the societally approved values may be at least initially conceptualized as static.




the goals of the civil rights movement as a whole and generally were regarded as quite moderate. Its first manifesto asked for (1) a revision of the franchise to allow poor Catholics (and Protestants)4 to vote in elections for local government authorities, (2) the allocation of public housing on the basis of need alone, (3) the allocation of government jobs on merit rather than on the de facto basis of religious affiliation, (4) an affirmation of the right of free speech, (5) a redrawing of certain gerrymandered electoral districts, and (6) the repeal of the Special Powers Act, the legislation under which the indefinite internment without charge or trial of suspected Republicans is presently authorized. It is widely acknowledged that these objectives were accepted as reasonable and legitimate, not only by virtually all Catholics, but also by considerable numbers of moderate Protestants, and indeed the early People's Democracy succeeded in attracting considerable support from Protestant students.5

The strategy by which the PD proposed to promote these demands was consciously modeled after the methods of the nonviolent American civil rights movement. The group engaged in marches, public meetings, petition campaigns, and sit-in's. Turner (1970) suggests that nonviolence combines coercive and persuasive strategies. If employed so as to bring about confrontation with the government, nonviolent tactics may be seen as essentially coercive and therefore quite radical; if on the other hand, the nonviolent demonstrators seem more interested in persuasion, then the tactic is definitely less radical (Sharp, 1970). The early PD engaged in relatively little civil diobedience, preferring tactics which were less upsetting to the Protestant government.

By the early spring of 1969, the group had undergone substantial radicalization. A number of sweeping "socialist" demands had been added to its repertoire, demands which were not supported by most other components of the civil rights movement. The PD election manifesto of February 1969 included planks supporting (1) the initiation of an emergency, government-financed home-building program, (2) worker's control of all state-owned factories, (3) the religious integration of all educational facilities, and (4) the breaking up of large estates and the redistribution of the land to small farmers in addition to the original civil rights demands. These left wing objectives were clearly regarded as far less legitimate by the public than the original moderate goals.6

The People's Democracy's choice of tactics during this period reflected the increased militancy of its demands. Marches and public meetings were

4While the primary purpose of most members of the civil rights movement in promoting this revision was to enfranchise Catholics, the chosen method of accomplishing this-the abolition of economic restrictions on

eligibility to vote in local government elections-had the largely inadvertent consequence of giving the vote to large numbers of impoverished Protestants as well as to a substantial number of Catholics.

"Evidence of the acceptability of these demands is provided in part by the sizable support given to the movement by the traditionally conservative Queen's University student body. Estimates of the size of the early marches range from 1,000 to 2,000, a very significant percentage of the roughly 5,000 students attending the university at the time (only 1,300 of whom were Catholic). More generally, the support of the moderate Protestant community for the original PD-CRM demands is suggested by the cautious yet clear advocacy of the program by the Belfast Telegraph, Northern Ireland's leading Protestant newspaper. Even the government-sponsored inquiry into the unrest of late 1968 which was chaired by John Cameron reported that these grievances were well-founded and in need of redress.

"As only one example of the response to the PD's new program, consider the following charge leveled by the Unionist minister of education during the election campaign: "PD has been entirely infiltrated and completely taken over. . .by radical Socialists, Irish Republicans, Trotskyites and Communists."




de-emphasized. While still nonviolent, the PD devoted increased attention to civil disobedience. Favored tactics included illegally moving homeless families into vacant, publicly-owned houses and conducting sit-in's in public buildings.

In August 1969 widespread rioting broke out in Belfast. The PD, shrunken in size due to the summer recess, took no active part as a group in the fighting, but members who were present as individuals in the riot area saw Catholics forced to act violently in order to protect their homes from Protestant mobs and from the police. When school resumed in the fall, the administration of the university forced the movement to relocate off-campus. The PD established itself in the poor, all-Catholic Falls Road area and actively began to recruit new supporters from the ghetto youth. The PD had never been entirely a student movement, but now the group's character was being markedly transformed. While the core leadership remained essentially the same as it had been since late 1968, the movement's lower participants were increasingly drawn from the working class Catholic youth of Falls Road.

By 1970 the ideology of the movement organization had shifted almost entirely away from support for the original civil rights demands. The PD now covertly advocated the overthrow of both the Protestant government in the North and the Catholic government of the Irish Republic and the establishment of an all-Irish socialist worker's republic, somewhat similar to contemporary Cuba. While the group still proposed certain short-term non-revolutionary changes, it did so primarily as a means of enlisting the support of the Catholic working class for its larger ends.

The actual tactics employed by the PD at this time did not radicalize as much as did the ideology, primarily because the presence of the British Army as a peacekeeping force after the August riots and the curfews and other restrictions which it imposed limited the scope of lawful activity open to the group, and because most of the members were still personally unwilling, despite their revolutionary ideology, to engage in terrorism. However, debates within the movement organization showed clearly that support for nonviolence, which had always been calculative and pragmatic (cf. Turner, 1970:159), was declining rapidly. This tactical radicalization, initially proposed in the late spring of 1970, was exemplified most clearly by the formation of a so-called "Red Guard" of muscular youths charged with the responsibility of protecting People's Democ- racy speakers from harassment during demonstrations and speeches.

In summary, between its birth in October 1968 and the conclusion of the observation of the group some two years later, the PD radicalized very markedly, moving from support of a relatively moderate set of civil rights demands to advocacy of revolutionary socialism, and from a whole-hearted acceptance of at least pragmatic nonviolence to a general rejection of that strategy.

III

This study is based upon data collected principally by means of participant observation.7 The selection of this research methodology was dictated in part by the exploratory nature of the research, but primarily by certain exigencies of the

;For an extensive consideration of the methodology of participant observation, see Bruyn (1966).




field setting and the character of the group being studied. Members of radical political movements do not make ideal subjects for conventional sociological research. Socialized to a Weltanschauung which sees much of the outside world as hostile, members of the PD tended to adopt a suspicious attitude toward outsiders who came prying into their affairs. This reaction was intensified in my case because I was an American, the United States being identified in the minds of many PD members as an evil and imperialistic nation. Given such attitudes, any attempt to employ questionnaires or other impersonal and quantitative instruments prior to establishing the strongest possible personal rapport with the members of the group would have been pointless. Participant observation provided a means of establishing such rapport while simultaneously gathering rich data. Although a short questionnaire was distributed toward the end of the research period, virtually all findings reported in this study rest on data collected by means of participant observation.

The precise research role which I adopted was the orientation described by Gold (1958) as participant-as-observer. I interacted regularly with PD members in a wide range of their daily activities, but never attempted to deny that I was engaging in sociological research. Entry into the group was secured through the sponsorship of a member of the Faculty of Law at Queen's University, Belfast, who was also active in the People's Democracy.

The actual data collection, which lasted eight months, employed four partially interrelated techniques:

1. Direct observation of PD meetings, demonstrations, and publishing activities. I participated as unobtrusively as possible but did take an active if minor role in PD marches and in selling the movement's newspaper door to door. I kept an extensive field diary of my direct observations.

2. Utilization of a key informant. I shared an apartment during most of my stay in Belfast with one of the core leaders of the PD who proved willing to serve as my eyes and ears at activities which I could not attend, either because I was elsewhere or because they were closed to outsiders.

3. Semi-structured formal interviews. These were conducted with twenty-four PD members, representing leaders of all major factions, followers, and some people who had dropped away from the group. Since many of the subjects expressed a desire not to be tape recorded, I took longhand notes of the interviews which were typed up and augmented from memory as soon after each interview as possible.

4. Documentary analysis of PD pamphlets, newspaper clippings, and similar sources.

Ultimately the validity of this and any similar study stands or falls on the reader's assessment of the researcher's astuteness. This is admittedly far less satisfying than a quantitative measure of validity, but such indeterminancy is integral to the character of the participant observation technique.

IV A number of factors were important in promoting the PD's radicalization, most of which also appear to have been operative in the radicalization of other similar movement organizations elsewhere.




1. Most of the existing theoretical literature on radicalization cites violent or coercive actions of the agents of social control, or violent actions of people who are perceived as allied with or at least not properly restrained by these agents, as the most important single causal factor producing radicalization provided that this repression is not so severe as to totally crush the movement (Rush and Denisoff, 1971:270; Wilkinson, 1971:137; Smelser, 1962:398; Oberschall, 1973:75). Thus, as an example, the beatings which the freedom riders received during the early phase of the American civil rights movement, combined with the perception that neither the state nor the federal government was willing to act against the attackers, is widely believed to have significantly influenced that movement's radicalization (Louis, 1970). Similarly, the police action which took place in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention was important in radicalizing S DS (Sale, 1973).

Physical repression by the authorities, or by those acting in concert with them, radicalizes for several reasons. It may serve as a decisive incident impelling moderates and others who are unwilling to risk physical injury or social condemnation to leave the movement organization, thus leaving the radicals in a much better position to control the entire group. Even more significantly, repression dramatizes to the remaining members that they are no longer regarded by the authorities as part of the moral community. The police fail to protect the demonstrators in the exercise of their basic rights, or may even attack them. Naturally this decreases the willingness of the members of the movement organization to co-operate with the authorities. No longer can the government be seen as a neutral or impartial force to which the group can appeal for support of its aims; the members realize that the government is their enemy. Overthrow of the government becomes an increasingly attractive goal, and coercive tactics logically take precedence over persuasive ones. The use of coercive tactics in turn calls down more repression on the demonstrators, and the cycle continues.

The PD experienced two outstanding incidents of repression in addition to frequent minor harassments. In early January 1969, four months after the group was founded, the PD undertook a four-day cross-country protest march from Belfast to Derry. On the morning of the fourth day the marchers were set upon by several hundred extreme Protestants in a field some miles outside of Derry and were stoned and severely beaten. Members of the group believe that many of their attackers were off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary, a reserve police force, and they charge that their on-duty escort did nothing to protect them from attack. This ambush was followed by a marked shift in the movement's rhetoric away from attempting to persuade the North Irish government to reform itself and toward attempting to force the British government to compel the Protestants to institute the desired changes.

The second incident which contributed to the PD's radicalization was the August 1969 rioting in Belfast. Catholics were under attack by Protestant mobs and also by the predominantly Protestant police force, and order was only restored by the British Army (Government of Northern Ireland, 1972). The Catholic enclave was poorly defended and a number of Catholics were killed. The massive show of Protestant force greatly decreased the PD's willingness to continue to advocate nonviolence. In part, this reflected the group's new




working class constituency which, understandably, was highly unsympathetic to such a tactic, but it also stemmed from the further dramatization that there existed no possibility of appeal to the good will of the Protestant authorities.

2. Another factor which can influence radicalization is a change in the orientations of a movement organization's constituency. A group can ordinarily radicalize only so much as its primary constituency will permit: greater radicalization will force it either to accept a massive loss of support or to seek new members. SNCC and to a lesser extent CORE, for example, radicalized much more dramatically after their primary constituency shifted from relatively well-educated middle and upper working class blacks to less well-educated, predominantly urban black youths (Forman, 1972; Meier and Rudwick, 1973).

The PD's original constituency was made up of Catholic and liberal Protestant students of Queen's University. Most of the students were neither willing nor able to commit themselves to long-term participation in a social movement. Many were fearful of becoming known as radicals. Few were willing to employ force in pursuit of their aims. After the August riots the PD's constituency was composed chiefly of Falls Road youths. This group provided a more radical constituency than the students in several ways. Most were considerably younger than the students, and younger members often are particularly radical in orientation (Myers, 1971). The working class converts were familiar with a community tradition of violent protest well over a century in age (Boyd, 1969) whereas the middle-class students were much less aware of this tradition. The ghetto youths were not afraid of harming their future careers by participating in radical action; they had little to lose. Their commitment to the group could be deeper than that of the students since it was not limited by an arbitrary three- or four-year academic career. Finally, the working class recruits were more strongly grounded than most of the students in the radical and violent Republican tradition, which further increased their willingness to employ violent strategies in hopes of promoting radical ends.

3. Movements are more likely to radicalize in certain types of societies than in others. In particular, movements which arise in dual societies like Northern Ireland, Quebec, or South Africa are especially likely to grow more radical. As Smelser (1962:279) suggests,

If political, economic, and ethnic cleavage coincide, it is difficult to prevent specific grievances and interests from generalizing. .. If the social bases for conflict of interest (e.g., position in economic or political order) are not separate from kinship, ethnic, regional or religious group, any grievance is likely to become a conflict of values.

In such circumstances, the ruling group is unable to differentiate between requests for normative change and challenges to its legitimacy. Moderate groups such as the early PD will be met with scorn and sometimes repression. Members will, in turn, be unwilling to give the government the benefit of the doubt and will assume that it acts from purely evil motives. The conflict will escalate.

Northern Ireland is a society marked by very strong cleavages between ethnic communities (Barritt and Carter, 1969). The Protestant and Catholic sectors are almost completely segregated; they live in separate housing, attend separate schools, work for separate employers, join separate unions, and are




buried in separate cemeteries. At least on the working class level there is very little support across the communities for any political party; the dominant Unionist Party and its right-wing splinters are almost entirely Protestant supported, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Republican Parties are almost entirely Catholic. Most Catholics are poor, many (although by no means all) Protestants are not. In these circumstances, groups working to improve the lot of Catholics within the system inevitably were viewed by the government as subversive and were treated as such. In time, they generally either became subversive, or gave up.

4. Another factor promoting radicalization is a low probability of co-optation (cf. Rush and Denisoff, 1971). Movement organizations which otherwise are ripe for radicalization sometimes fail to develop in this fashion because their leaders are given a role within the dominant sector of the society. Semi- institutionalized groups like the NAACP or NOW demonstrate this possibility very clearly. If the costs of movement participation are high and the potential rewards are relatively low, and if the government offers substantial rewards to the movement's supporters and leaders, then the group is probably more likely to be co-opted and to grow more conservative than it is to radicalize. If, on the other hand, co-optation is unlikely, then radicalization is more probable.

In the case of the PD, the Unionist government had little to gain by co-optation. The politicans did not need Catholic support in order to stay in power. They risked none of their Protestant support by repressing the PD since the vast majority of their backers were strongly opposed to the movement. They did not believe that the PD commanded sufficient strength among the Catholic community to allow it to organize an effective boycott or other potentially embarrassing tactics. In short, the relative weakness of the movement organization combined with the self-sufficiency of the Protestant state to ensure that there would be no offer of co-optation.

5. Horowitz (1970:114) suggests an inverse relationship between a movement organization's ability to exert control over its members and its propensity for political violence. The case of the P D would suggest that, at least in the initial stages of a group's development, such a relationship exists between internal control and other forms of radicalization as well. A movement organization with tight internal structure is able to compel its members to follow orders and to behave responsibly at most times. Individuals who violate these rules can be punished. Thus incidents of individuals running amok at demonstrations and provoking repression are relatively uncommon. Furthermore, in such a movement organization it is relatively difficult for radical leaders to attain positions of power if the group does not accept their ideological stance. On the other hand, in a group which is less capable of disciplining members, radicals will more easily be able to attain positions of leadership and the actions of individual members will be more difficult to control. Rudwick and Meier's (1970) comparison of CORE and the NAACP illustrates these points very well.

The PD was initially a participatory democracy, much like SDS (Sale, 1973:52), SNCC (Forman, 6972:220; Zinn, 1964:1), CORE (Rudwick and Meier, 1970:15) and a number of other important movement organizations. There was no central authority; everyone who attended a meeting was eligible to




vote on any issue; there were no officials empowered to maintain order and discipline at demonstrations; there was no provision for an official PD spokesman and therefore anyone who had been active in the group was equally able to speak for it. Under these circumstances, radicalization was promoted. When small groups of radicals broke nonviolent discipline in early demonstrations, no authority existed to expel them from the group and the whole movement was condemned for their actions. Because there were no elected leaders, certain dedicated radicals who could not have secured democratic election were able to become known as prominent members, simply through working diligently and speaking up at appropriate moments.

6. At quite another level of analysis the presence of individual radical leaders within a group is also an essential precondition of radicalization (Wilkinson, 1971:137). Recognition of this fact is not necessarily equivalent to acceptance of the common charge that "outside agitators" are the chief cause of radicalization. A movement will not become more radical despite the presence of radicals within it unless a number of the other factors previously discussed are present. Further, if these other factors are impelling a movement toward radicalization, previously moderate leaders are likely to become personally radicalized and to play the role of radical leaders. In the PD there were three types of radical leaders: a group of individuals, somewhat older than the general membership, who previously had been active in sectarian socialist politics; a small group of active Republicans who were oriented to a radical tactical position; and a third group of formerly moderate individuals who became more radical over time. The best known of the early PD, Bernadette Devlin, was a member of this third category.

7. The example of the PD suggests that further radicalization of a movement organization's ideology is likely to be promoted by any codification of that ideology in the form of a published list of demands, an election manifesto, an important speech by a key leader, etc., provided that a marked trend toward radicalization already exists. This results from promulgation of a formal, codified ideology which forces members of the movement organization to recognize consciously just how radical the group has become. Until the ideology is formalized, moderates may drift along without ever coming to grips with the changes that have taken place in it, especially if they form a coherent interactional group within the movement organization. But once the ideology is codified, moderates are likely to recognize that they no longer accept the group's aims and they drop out. Similarly, the codification of an appreciably more radical ideology may also serve to increase the attractiveness of the group to a more radical constituency which previously had been uninterested in joining what they believed to be a moderate group.

In February 1969 the PD codified its ideology in order to issue an election manifesto in support of its eight candidates. Many moderate student members of the group dropped out at this time in frustration over the leftward trend. Many of the moderates who remained were active in the campaigns, defending and explaining the planks of the platform, and in the process socializing themselves into acceptance of the movement organization's new and more radical posture. At the same time, the manifesto showed that the PD's ideology was demonstra-




bly more radical than that of the other components of the civil rights movement, and as a result a number of non-student radicals in the provincial towns where the campaigns were conducted founded radical branches of the PD. A somewhat similar process occurred in early 1970 when a general meeting of the movement debated and approved a motion formally committing it to the revolutionary goal of the worker's republic.

8. Finally, it should be noted that the radicalization of the People's Democracy was significantly affected by that group's ongoing relationship with a number of other movement organizations which were engaged in the common struggle for civil rights. Generalizations concerning the impact of what Zurcher and Kirkpatrick (1976) term the multiorganizational field on movement organization radicalization require considerable qualification, but the importance of this factor cannot be ignored in any study of the radicalization process.

There were three movement organizations with which the People's Democ- racy regularly interacted: (1) The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), a relatively moderate, predominantly middle-class group which coordinated the activities of numerous local movement organizations throughout the province, (2) The Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), whose political position was roughly similar to that of NICRA, and (3) the Republican Movement, most of whose members advocated a violent overthrow of the Protestant government and reunification of Ireland under a socialist government. These three groups plus the PD constituted the core of the general social movement promoting civil rights in Northern Ireland during the period 1968-1970.

A movement organization may be influenced by its multiorganizational field in two different ways. First, there may be an ideological trend toward radicalization among all or most of the components of the general social movement, leading naturally to a dialectical escalation of demands and tactics in the movement organization. There is certainly no question that something of this sort occurred in the People's Democracy; not only did all of the components of the general movement grow somewhat more radical over the period of study, but the influence of the relatively more moderate movement organizations (N ICRA and NILP) declined while that of the more extreme Republican Movement clearly increased.

On the other hand, since the PD remained in the vanguard of the radicalization process, leading rather than conforming to the escalation, the ideological influence of component groups of the general social movement is not enough by itself to explain the People's Democracy's radicalization.

It seems likely that any movement which is, in Turner and Killian's (1972) terms, value-oriented, is likely, other factors permitting, to follow any marked radicalization trend which appears in the multiorganizational field surrounding it. However, this may not hold for a movement which is more concerned with gaining power than with actualizing its values. Such a group may conservatize while its multiorganizational field is becoming more radical if it perceives the vacated middle ground as an appropriate position from which to seek increased power.




Second, if a number of the leaders or active members of a movement organization are personally associated with other components of the general social movement, the influence of these movement organizations would seem likely to influence the radicalization process. This infuence may either promote or retard radicalization depending upon the specific ideological and tactical positions of the components of the movement that are involved.

This was, however, not a significant factor in the People's Democracy. Thirty-two of the forty-eight leaders and active members who were interviewed early in 1970 reported virtually no political affiliations whatsoever outside of the PD. The remainder were distributed roughly equally between NICRA, NILP, sectarian socialist groups, and the Republican movement. Most of the minority who were members of other groups reported that their primary loyalty definitely was owed to the People's Democracy.

In summary, it is clear that the multiorganizational field plays a role in the radicalization process, but it is difficult to generalize concerning that role because it seems so frequently to be mediated through other factors such as the shifting influence of individual leaders and the balance of power and value orientations in the movement organization.

V

The logic underlying this investigation compels a certain degree of caution in uncritically assuming that the eight propositions which have been developed here can be applied without some modification to a wide range of other social movements. They are significant in the development of one movement organization, the PD, and secondary data suggests their presence in a number of other groups. Their generality is a matter for further empirical investigation.

Lacking an encompassing theoretical framework, we cannot specify pre- cisely how many of these factors must be present in order for a particular movement organization to radicalize. But an examination of the parallel case of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association suggests strongly that, considered collectively, that there is considerable predictive power in these propositions. Although it developed in the same dual society and was a component of the same general social movement as the PD, NICRA's radicalization between late 1968 and mid-1970 was far more limited. This may be accounted for by the following factors: -NICRA's activities never aroused the sort of physical or verbal repression which the PD experienced; -NICRA members came from essentially the same rather conservative constituency (primarily well-educated middle-class Catholics) throughout the period under consideration; -the considerably larger numbers of people who were members of NICRA combined with the greater respectability of those members, meant that the government was far more interested in co-opting it than it was in attempting to gain the allegiance of the PD: -the NICRA leadership exercised substantially more internal control over the group's members than the PD's leaders were able to achieve;




-the few individual radical leaders who were originally members of NICRA abandoned the organization early in its career: -because NICRA's radicalization was very slow, codification of its principles did not serve to push the group in a radical direction.

VI

Broadly speaking, my position is that radicalization, rather than being an aberration, is a common type of movement development. It is, in fact, perfectly normal for movement organizations to grow either more or less radical. This paper has concentrated on radicalization, but there are many examples of the reverse process, which might be termed conservatization-the Black Panther Party runs a candidate for the mayoraltry of Oakland, California; the Townsend Plan abandons its program of societal reform (Messinger, 1955); the Salvation Army makes its peace with the world (Robertson, 1967); and the temperance movement becomes less militant after the Repeal (Gusfield, 1963). The logic of this discussion suggests the tentative conclusion that radicalization and conservatization are in fact the two halves of a single dynamic process of value transformation which affects all social movements. Once movement organizations begin to institutionalize, the Weberian model becomes appropriate, but this model is too determinate and simplistic when applied to younger, less routinized groups. This paper has suggested certain factors which increase the likelihood that a movement organization will radicalize. Eventually further research may isolate and identify additional factors which affect whether an active movement will radicalize or conservatize.

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Stephen Beach is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wyoming. His primary research interest is social movement organization dynamics, and he is preparing an undergraduate level text on social movements. He also is analyzing quantitative data concerning religious stereotyping.



social movement radicalization: the case of the people's democracy in northern ireland

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