In his 1966 essay “The Artukovitch File”, Hubert Butler (1900-91) insisted that “the correlation of respectability and crime […] has to be […] carefully investigated” (2016g: 251). This was necessary because he believed that respectability had played an important role in the catastrophes that had wracked twentieth-century Europe. But while he wrote perceptively about societies and how they understood their pasts, Butler was not an academic sociologist or a historian, and so never offered a definition of respectability, nor did he subject it to any form of systematic, sustained analysis. However, in uncovering the ways in which Butler understood the workings of respectability and charted its operations in his reflections on Irish and Croatian historical experiences, it becomes apparent that this concept played a crucial role in the transnational linkages he sought to forge between these two countries.

Defining respectability is not a straightforward matter, as it gestures towards would-be eternal concepts that should be innately understood and do not need elucidation. It is, as Woodruff D. Smith points out, a relatively recent concept, and “its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from 1784” (2018: 1). Smith’s study leans heavily on the work of George L. Mosse, who, across a series of texts, traced how respectability was both a product of modernity and a reaction against it. Respectability was adopted as a marker of social acceptability by the “triumphant bourgeoisie” in the nineteenth century and “served to legitimize and define” them, while also providing a sense of “stability” in an increasingly complicated modern world, which had largely come about through “changes” that this social group “had itself initiated” (Mosse 2020 [1985]: 10). For this reason, respectability was typically constructed around the establishment and performance of simplistic, hierarchical and exclusionary attitudes to discourses such as imperialism, nationalism, religion, gender and race (Mosse 2023 [1961]: 15-32). As Mosse put it, respectability “assigned everyone his place in life, man and woman, normal and abnormal, native and foreigner; any confusion between these categories threatened chaos and loss of control” (2020 [1985]: 17). At the heart of Mosse’s analysis is the imbrication of nationalism, “perhaps the most powerful and effective ideology of modern times”, and respectability, both of which appear simultaneously on the European stage: “just as modern nationalism emerged in the eighteenth century, so the ideal of respectability […] fell into place at the same time”^⁠ (2020 [1985]: 10 and 3). Indeed, while nationalism has taken many different forms, it has “hardly wavered in its advocacy of respectability” (2020 [1985]: 11).

The invocations of respectability in Butler’s work suggest that his understanding of the term had considerable parallels with Mosse’s. At the same time, as so many of his essays make clear, Butler also believed that modes of nationalism and religion that preceded and exceeded the constricting embrace of respectability had the potential to provide ethical approaches to living in society. As will be elaborated upon, for Butler respectability was an abstraction, one that fractured longstanding, more intimate, lived bonds between people, and replaced them with concepts of nationalism and religion that originated from, and were focused on, centralised sites of power. For this reason, Butler argued throughout his work that smaller communities, where people knew each other, offered a bulwark against this sort of abstraction. To an extent, this flew in the face of the evidence Butler accumulated in Ireland and Croatia. Many people in both these smaller, more peripheral, countries were drawn to what they viewed as their religious, cultural or imperial centres, and aped modes of respectability that they thought were practiced in these, with the result that they lost sight of their neighbours to sometimes disastrous effect.

Today these two nations have a very different relationship to the one they had in Butler’s lifetime as, for many Croatians, Ireland has come to represent a gateway to Western metropolitan norms. Within a few years of Croatia’s accession to the European Union in 2013, roughly 20,000, mostly younger and better-educated Croatians moved to Ireland, attracted by its fluid and dynamic labour market (Rajković Iveta and Horvatin 2017; Archer 2025). As a result, Ireland shifted from the outer edges of Croatia’s political discourse to a more prominent position, functioning both as a rebuke of the inability of the country’s politicians to provide for their own citizens, and as an example that Croatia might follow: a paradigmatic case of how a small, peripheral European country might find its way in the world of globalised capitalism (Archer 2025: 345). At the same time, Irish films, music and literature have been finding large audiences in Croatia^⁠. As in the field of neoliberal economics, this is mostly one-way traffic, with Croatian cultural outputs rarely eliciting attention in Ireland. Once again, this Croatian interest is very much a reflection of the position Anglophone Irish culture has fashioned for itself on a global stage. To give but one example, Patricija Horvat’s translations of Sally Rooney’s novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Divni svijete, gdje si) (2021) and Intermezzo (2024), were issued by the publisher, Fraktura, more or less simultaneously with the originals to take advantage of the worldwide attention that these novels engendered. A similar dynamic could also be traced in Croatian academic engagement with Irish literature, which until relatively recently operated under the substantial shadow of Joyce. If his four-month sojourn in Pula accounts for some of this attention, it is also an expression of what might be termed Joyce’s metropolitan respectability. As Pascale Casanova has argued, Joyce and other writers of the Irish Literary Revival are a paradigmatic case study of how a peripheral culture attained a key position in the metropolitan centres of the World Republic of Letters^⁠ (2004: 303-23).

These trends may also account for the relative lack of attention that is paid to Butler in both Croatia and Ireland. He spent considerably longer in Croatia than Joyce did, spoke the language and wrote at length about the country, but the ways in which he brought the two countries into dialogue swam against the currents of globalisation as, for Butler, it was imperative that smaller, peripheral, countries communicate directly with each other and not through mediating centres of power: “[w]e are stupidly, snobbishly, uninterested in other small nations,” he wrote, “yet we have more to learn from them than from the large ones” (1990a: 67). In his work, neither country charts a route towards the centre that the other might emulate; rather, the dangers of the magnetic pull of metropoles is emphasised. Writing of the Ireland in which he grew up, he noted that: “[o]ur island is dangerously tilted towards England and towards Rome, good places in themselves but best seen on the level. Everybody is rolling off it and those that remain, struggling hard for a foothold, drag each other down” (1990c: 19). The attraction of metropoles lies in the belief that proof of personal worth or of a culture’s standing can only be bestowed there; in other words, they confer respectability. As Butler commented on his own life in 1985: “in a strongly centripetal world, staying at home is scarcely respectable” (1986e: 1). While Butler’s family had very deep roots in Kilkenny – they could trace their ancestry back to the Normans – his parents refused to accept the new political order in Ireland and instead held on to a vision of Britain as their centre. Reflecting on the 1984 New Ireland Forum Report, Butler gave a glimpse into their thinking:

[m]y family […] was a typical Anglo-Irish Protestant one, and with the rare exception thought broadly the same as our neighbours. To very few of them was the establishment of a Free State a heartwarming occasion. To most of them it was rather a bad joke. The Irish language seemed to them wanton simplification. To the end of his life my father called the Dail “The Dale” (Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/531).

In keeping with this worldview, his mother expected him to go into “the British consular and diplomatic services” (Butler 1990c: 23). However, not only did he declare himself to be an Irish nationalist, much to his family’s chagrin, but he also chose to concentrate on Slavic languages, and subsequently spent extended periods in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia – not the most popular of destinations for an Irishman in the interwar years. After his father died in 1941, he inherited Maidenhall, the family house and estate in Kilkenny, which became his base for the rest of his life.

The sort of provincial cosmopolitanism that characterised his career is also a defining feature of Butler’s essays. As he noted in 1985, “even when [his] essays appear to be about Russia or Greece or Spain or Yugoslavia, they are really about Ireland” (1986e: 2). This is best read as signifying a reciprocal motion: Butler did not just seek out events, themes or topics in foreign lands that spoke to Irish experience, but his perspectives on other countries were also informed by his particular Irish environment. Or, to put it more accurately, by the way in which he understood the history of Anglo-Irish Protestants, to employ the designation Butler used in the citation above.[1] And, as he chronicled it, a pivotal moment in this group’s history was its adoption of respectability.

As Smith noted, the discourse of respectability emerged as a “response to undesirable aspects of modernity” (2018: viii), and to the French Revolution, in particular. In the nineteenth century, respectability sought to tame modernity by framing it within terms drawn from Romantic conceptions of previous, aristocratic, eras, with the result that racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies were not challenged but consolidated as the middle classes mobilised ideas such as chivalry, gentility, manliness, tradition and religion. This history of respectability maps on to Butler’s reading of Anglo-Irish Protestantism. For Butler, its high point was in the eighteenth century, as is evident in the 1960 essay, “The Bishop”, in which he celebrates the non-pious form of Protestantism that he believed was encapsulated in the life and career of Robert Fowler, a bishop of Kilkenny in the early nineteenth century. The body of the essay is drawn from Fowler’s diary, especially his account of his time on continental Europe in the 1790s before he became bishop, when he was involved in a number of sexual liaisons. But he was not just “robust in his tastes, liking horses, betting and balls” (1986i: 33), he was also essentially fair and just, arguing, for instance, that even if granting the vote to Catholics would endanger Protestants’ hold on Irish land, it was, nevertheless, a form of “[o]ppression” to deprive them of this privilege (1986i: 34). In short, Fowler’s attitudes epitomised for Butler the sort of independent spirit that he believed defined, and was nurtured by, the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish world, “an urbane and sociable society, confident in its own values” (1986i: 33).

In “The Country House after the Union” (1957), Butler recounted how this confidence dissipated in the wake of the Act of Union and was replaced by a dull respectability. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Anglo-Irish began to retreat into themselves, having “been scared, first by the French revolution and then by the ’98 rebellion” (1986j: 49). “[A] full century” was followed by “an empty one” (1986j: 46-47), and the Anglo-Irish started to ape what they saw as English manners and mores. “Down with ideas!” (1986j: 49) became their mantra, as these had produced the guillotine and the United Irishmen, and a nervous sectarian piety that called itself respectability became the dominant ethos of this community. In this context, when “[e]very respectable person was thinking [about the horrors of republican rebellion and Catholicism], it needed courage and independence of mind in a high degree to swim upstream against so strong a current” (1986j: 50). If such bravery was largely absent in the Anglo-Irish, Butler nevertheless searched out and highlighted examples of eccentric, often self-taught men who stood athwart conventional respectability, such as Maria Edgeworth’s father, R.L. Edgeworth, and the father of the Duke of Wellington, Mr Wesley^⁠.[2]

Similar figures dominate his essays on how the Anglo-Irish responded to the changing state of Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Some of these, such as Horace Plunkett (1854-1932) and George Russell (Æ) (1867-1935), are well known, while others like Otway Cuffe (1853-1912) are less heralded. All three, though, provided Butler with models of a grounded, neighbourly, nationalism that he championed throughout his life. They were also, in Butler’s terms, not respectable, in the sense that they did not ape metropolitan – in this case, British – norms. These men did not turn away from Ireland as the forces of nationalism and Catholicism advanced and eventually took control of the country; instead, they engaged with their communities in local actions to build up and ameliorate the places in which they lived. Plunkett founded the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), a cooperative movement that, in Patrick Doyle’s words, sought “to revitalise Irish character with its economic interventions”, and which, by changing the face of Irish agriculture, “exercised a crucial influence over the form taken by the Irish nation-state” (2019: 202).^⁠ Alongside his numerous other activities, Russell also worked for the IAOS, becoming the editor of its newspaper, The Irish Homestead, in 1905. Cuffe was twice elected mayor of Kilkenny, and devoted a considerable part of his life to researching and promoting the Irish language, Irish folklore and peasant crafts. If Butler looked to these figures to locate himself in an alternative, historically-rooted, precisely local, tradition within his own community, his accounts of these men also record their struggles and failures. Cuffe’s activities, for instance, which were driven by “centrifugal” impulses that drove him to focus on “the small and the local” and what “was clear and concrete and from near at hand”, were swamped by the hazy allure of a more respectable, abstract internationalism – “the pull upon conventionally educated minds towards great remote events” in the years before the First World War (Butler 1990b: 14 and 15). Standing at angles to the discourses that dominated their contemporaries’ worldviews, Cuffe, Plunkett, Russell and the other Anglo-Irish Protestant figures that Butler took as inspirations directly informed his understanding of the nature and limitations of respectability.

Butler cultivated a not dissimilar intellectual milieu during his first stay in Zagreb, which began in 1934 and lasted roughly three years. He went there on a scholarship from the School of Slavonic Studies in London and, in Butler’s own words, “Dr. Georgevitch”, who established the Anglo-American Yugoslav Friendship Society where Butler worked as a teacher, his “immediate superior” there, Milan Ćurčin (1880-1960), and their friend, Robert William Seton-Watson (1879-1951), “might be considered [three] of the founders of the Yugoslav state” (Butler 2016c: 281)^⁠. Amongst his other positions, Irinej Đorđević (Georgevitch) (1894-1952) was the Orthodox bishop of Dalmatia, while Ćurčin, who Butler called “a fascinating man”^⁠ and with whom he stayed in contact for some time (Butler 2016c: 281), was also Serbian. He had worked at the Serbian delegation in London during the First World War, and had advocated for a form of political unification of South Slavs in which Serbia would be “the first among equals” (Leček 2025 [1993]).[3] After the war Ćurčin worked at the University of Belgrade, and when Butler knew him he was in Zagreb editing the journal Nova Evropa (1920-41), which was modelled on The New Europe (1916-20), a weekly political magazine founded by, amongst others, Seton-Watson, that promoted the cause of the newly-independent smaller Slavic states. Nova Evropa looked to bring similarly cosmopolitan and liberal perspectives to bear on discussions about Yugoslavia and, through it, Ćurčin collaborated with prominent Croatian figures, including the most famous twentieth-century Croatian artist, the sculptor Ivan Meštrović, to draw up a draft constitution for Yugoslavia in 1937 that proposed a more complex arrangement than one with Serbia simply taking the lead (Leček 2025 [1993]). In short, some of Butler’s first contacts in Zagreb held insider-outsider positions in Croatia that could be said to mirror those held by the Anglo-Irish intellectuals and artists with whom he was acquainted in Ireland. People like Plunkett, Æ, Cuffe and W.B. Yeats, who stood outside the dominant Catholic ethos of the emerging/new Irish state but were also central to the cultural and social life of the country, a point Butler makes time and again about the Anglo-Irish.[4]^⁠ Considered as sources of information about Yugoslavia, Đorđević and Ćurčin held very privileged positions, and would have provided real insights for Butler; however, it is the case that they were noted pro-Yugoslav voices in Croatia before the Second World War, and their conception of this state had a Serbian and Orthodox slant.^⁠

Robert Tobin has noted that, on a personal level, the source of Butler’s “interest in the Balkans is not exactly clear”⁠ (2012: 61). Indeed, Butler almost invariably pointed to intellectual parallels whenever he reflected on the reasons for his over-riding interest in this region: the fact that Yugoslavia and the new Irish state should be considered as Succession States, as both had emerged out of empires in the post-First World War period. As he wrote in 1979: “I think I was first attracted there […] by the fact that it attained its independence at the same time as we did in Ireland and had to confront similar problems of diverse religions, culture[s], loyalties”^⁠ (cited in Agee 2016: 28). Butler was unequivocal that “there is no such thing as a pure national culture” (2016k: 124)^⁠ and Yugoslavia brought together the Latin, Slav and Muslim worlds as well as other minorities, such as Jews and Roma. But when Butler returned to Zagreb in 1946, he was faced with overwhelming evidence of the horrific discord that had exploded in the Second World War between the various communities that made up Yugoslavia. Butler did not accept this as proof of the impossibility of the sort of local, non-racial, nationalism that he advocated; instead, he chose to analyse the reasons behind the failure of this nation, which involved unearthing facts and events that many preferred to keep buried.

At the heart of Butler’s essays on postwar Yugoslavia are the crimes committed by the so-called Independent State of Croatia, known by the acronym NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska), and the Catholic Church’s knowledge of, and direct involvement in, these. The NDH, which covered a substantial amount of present-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, was created by the Nazis in 1941 after their invasion of Yugoslavia. They vouchsafed the administration of this state to the Ustaše, which had been operating as a far-right Croatian terrorist organisation that had committed a series of outrages: most notably, it was directly involved in the assassination of King Aleksandar I of Yugoslavia in 1934. It could be argued that this peripheral Nazi puppet state sought not just to mimic but to outdo the fascist centre in terms of its barbaric pursuit of ethnic purity, which in this case meant a Croatian Catholic state.^⁠ Almost immediately a series of anti-Jewish and anti-Serbian decrees were issued by Ante Pavelić (1889-1959), the head of the Ustaše who styled himself Poglavnik (Leader) of the NDH (Tanner 2001: 141-67). While Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political opponents suffered hugely, there was a particular emphasis on uprooting Orthodox Serbs. The policy had a brutal simplicity: “a third of the two million Serbs in the NDH would be expelled; a third would be assimilated through conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism; and a third would be killed”^⁠ (Glenny 2012: 498). The calculation of the number of deaths caused by different groups in the Second World War continues to be an obscene source of political contention in the countries of former Yugoslavia. However, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the historian Ivo Goldstein have estimated “that between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbs, and at least 25,000 Roma, were killed by the Ustaše […] [while] 30,000 Croatian and Bosnian Jews [were] also either killed directly by the Ustaše, or deported to Nazi death camps”^⁠ (cited in Butler 2016h: 178n).

Butler’s essays on this dismal period focused on the forced conversion campaign pursued by the NDH, which, shortly after its creation, “decreed that […] the Orthodox Church in Croatia was to be dissolved and conversions could be made to the other three Churches, Evangelical, Moslem [sic] and Greek Catholic or Uniate”^⁠ (Butler 2016d: 130). Butler sought to draw public attention in Ireland and the West to the number and manner of deaths committed in the name of this campaign. He felt impelled to do this because these crimes were either not receiving much attention or were being simply denied in the new postwar political context, in which communism was the enemy for the West. In these Cold War conditions there was no appetite to pursue the involvement of the Church in the crimes committed in the NDH. On the contrary, the Catholic Church was vaunting itself as a bulwark against communism and was directing public opinion in the West against Tito’s new Yugoslavia, especially as it had imprisoned the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac (1898-1960), for collaborating with the NDH^⁠ (Blain 2023).

Stepinac’s name has no real resonance in Ireland now, but in 1949 reputedly the largest demonstration “ever seen in Dublin” (Butler 1986e: 12) took place, when roughly 150,000 people marched to protest against his incarceration and that of the Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty, who was imprisoned by Mátyás Rákosi’s communist regime. A key element in the international campaign to style Stepinac as a martyr was a short hagiography, Archbishop Stepinac, The Man and His Case (1947), by the Irish-Austrian Count of Thomond, Anthony Henry O’Brien, which cast Stepinac as a Christ-like figure. As Butler describes it, O’Brien’s book was simply a piece of propaganda produced by a centralised power structure that sought to solidify Stepinac’s postwar respectability. It

had an introduction by the Archbishop of Dublin, and commendation on the dust-cover from a couple of cardinals, Canadian and English, and half a dozen bishops and archbishops. Cardinal Spellman laid a copy of the book on the foundation stone of the new Stepinac Institute in New York, USA, and told 1700 schoolgirls, drawn up on a polo-ground in the form of a rosary, what they were to think about Croatian ecclesiastical history. Yet it seemed to me that there was a major error of fact or of interpretation, or a significant omission, on almost every page of this book. (Butler 2016j: 228)

O’Brien was also the foreign editor of the Irish weekly, The Standard (from 1963, The Catholic Standard), which was in the vanguard of the attacks on Butler’s revelations about the Croatian Catholic Church’s involvement in the NDH’s compulsory conversion campaign. Butler sought to rebut the claims about Stepinac made by O’Brien and the editor of this paper, Peadar O’Curry, by furnishing translated documents that showed Stepinac’s support for the NDH (Stepinac 1941a; Stepinac 1941b). Butler also provided a translation of a letter from Stepinac to Pavelić (20 November 1941), which revealed that Stepinac was aware of the conversion campaign and the barbarities that were being committed in its name. In diplomatic tones, Stepinac lodged a clear protest against this conduct, but instead of asking for the termination of the campaign, he insisted that it should be put under the direction of the Catholic Church (cited in Butler 2016h: 180-92). Rather remarkably, Butler got the opportunity to question Stepinac directly about this letter when he visited him in prison in 1950. Butler asked him why, if he was so clearly appalled by the horrors of the conversion campaign, he chose a Mgr. Shimrak to collaborate on the regulation of it, considering “Shimrak’s enthusiasm for the disgraceful campaign had been well known and publicly expressed”. In response, Stepinac “gave the stock reply he had so often given at his trial […]: ‘Notre conscience est tranquille’”^⁠ (Butler 2016b: 201). In like fashion, Butler’s Catholic antagonists in Ireland never really responded to the evidence Butler provided, and instead appealed to a respectable consensus: O’Curry, for instance, once accused Butler “of being a Communist” (Tobin 2012: 134).[5] This dynamic was played out in Butler and O’Curry’s most fateful encounter in 1952 when Butler attempted to raise questions after O’Curry had given a talk at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Association in Dublin on the treatment of Catholics in Yugoslavia. The papal nuncio was also present but left the moment Butler began to talk. Official and Catholic Ireland interpreted this bit of ecclesiastical theatrics as a reaction to Butler insulting him. This created a considerable furore, and Butler was ostracised by the main body of respectable Irish society.[6]

As a result, Butler struggled to find outlets for his articles on Croatia, telling Hannah Arendt in a 1966 letter that “even liberal Catholic organs do not find it easy to be truthful about this business” (Letter to Hannah Arendt, 2 March 1966, Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/606/105). He had got in touch with Arendt in 1965 in the hope that she might be able to help him find a home in an international journal for his essay on Andrija Artuković (1899-1988); The Irish Times had run the first part but took fright at the reaction to it, and would not publish the second half.^⁠[7] Artuković, the NDH’s Minister of the Interior, was, in Butler’s words, “dedicated to the extermination not of Jews alone, but also of his fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox”^⁠ (2016g: 250). Facilitated by Franciscan ratlines, he and his family spent a year in Ireland after the war under an alias before leaving for the USA. In “The Artukovitch File”, Butler relates how, in the course of tracking Artuković’s movements in Ireland, almost everyone who had come in contact with the family and did not know their past declared them to be eminently respectable. One of Artuković’s former landladies in leafy south county Dublin flatly refused to believe what Butler was telling her about him: in her eyes, “[a]ll he cared about was his family. He was a wonderful father and husband! […] And he loved the Church. They were daily communicants”^⁠ (2016g: 266-67). Pavelić, who was also helped by elements in the Catholic Church to evade justice at the end of the war, ending up in Argentina, was another consummate performer of conventional Catholic respectability. As Butler noted in a 1953 letter, Pavelić

certainly considered himself a very devout Catholic, was most scrupulous in his religious observances and had a private chapel attached to his house. The point about him is really that except for his partiality for compulsory conversion and massacres he was devastatingly respectable (Letter to John Lawrence, 25 February 1953, Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/606/35; original emphasis).

Respectability not only facilitated the blindness to, and condonation of, the gross criminality of these figures, but, as Butler noted of Artuković, respectability was also the hallmark of his heinous activities: he “was, like Himmler, a ‘desk-murderer’, who deplored the disorderly and sadistic way in which his instructions were carried out. He was respectable” (2016g: 251).

Informing Mosse’s history of the discourse of respectability is the conviction that it was fundamental to the rise of fascism. As he noted, “the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp” was “a good family man, fond of nature and animals” (2023 [1961]: 390). Mosse did not see this “seemingly fantastic moral contradiction” as an aberration, but rather as an expression “of the movement’s ideology”, in which “[b]ourgeois respectability and genocide could be fused into one” (2023 [1961]: 390). Mosse’s focus was chiefly trained on German and Italian fascisms, and his work sought to understand the ways in which they co-opted the language of bourgeois respectability – “honest work, cleanliness, loyalty and a neat appearance” (1978: 43) – while^⁠, at different phases in their incarnations, they also repudiated bourgeois values.[8] Forging this connection in the Croatian case is less problematic, in the sense that the NDH’s vision of the country was rooted in traditional Catholicism and did not pose as many challenges to bourgeois morality as the more revolutionary aspects of Italian and German fascisms did.

For Butler, the link between bourgeois respectability and fascist death camps was to be found in the idea of professionalism, his aversion to which is evident in essays on the way archaeology ceased to be practiced by gentlemen amateurs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries^⁠ (see Butler 1986f; 1990d). The discourse of professionalism evolved as the nineteenth-century middle classes looked to establish the statuses of their jobs. Professions organised themselves into what Smith termed “highly exclusionary” associations that “argued that their members could be trusted to perform their duties to their clients and to the public in general because they were respectable – that is, respected by others who could assess their qualifications, and also respected by themselves”^⁠ (2018: 142). This professionalisation of life gave rise to what Butler called the Organization Man: a person who operates entirely within the limits of his/her profession, who never questions its morality, but is only concerned with maintaining the hierarchy within which s/he hopes to advance. Butler’s most thorough exposition of this phenomenon can be found in his essay “The Final Solution” (1962), in which he provides an account of how an “immensely ordinary” man, Adolf Eichmann, followed the logic and dictates of the organisation for which he worked and so “moved by degrees towards the Final Solution”^⁠ (2016i: 473, 475). In many respects, Butler also saw Stepinac as an Organization Man, as he believed that Stepinac was not driven by anti-Semitism or a hatred of Serbs; rather, “his guiding principle was loyalty to the established authority and its armies”, which manifested itself in “the principle of a state-controlled Church” (2016f: 151, 152). This focus on professional respectability blinded him to the broader ethical implications of his projects.

The Organization Man is also the title of an influential 1956 survey of American business and social practices by William Whyte. It argued that “a utopian faith” in the power of organizational thinking had emerged in the USA, with the result that “Man exists as a unit of society”^⁠ (1963: 12). For Whyte, this was a major change in American life, one that was displacing the “Protestant Ethic” and its ideal of rugged individualism that had undergirded that society, even if the Organization Man would still evoke this archetype to rebut any suggestion that her/his thinking had left-wing connotations (1963: 10). While not suggesting that Whyte and Butler are talking about exactly the same phenomenon, it is nonetheless the case that their mid-century Organization Men share a couple of broad characteristics.

The first is the way that they thrive in larger corporations and countries. Discussing Eichmann, Butler wondered, “[c]an one argue that in small countries, where anonymity is difficult, the Organization Man cannot operate freely?”^⁠ (2016i: 486). In larger structures, abstractions become necessary, and the Organization Man flourishes in concepts such as a nationalism rooted in the idea that one is inextricably bound to unknown other people in distant places on racial grounds, or because they speak the same language or practice the same religion (see Butler 2016e). As has been noted, for Butler, thinking of people in abstract terms inevitably produced a bad politics and, despite the example of Croatia, he cleaved to the idea that this might be forestalled in more intimate communities. This is, of course, entirely in keeping with his advocacy of the grounded, local, neighbourly, nationalism that found expression in the figures of Plunkett, Æ and Cuffe, and so, as he put it in the opening sentence of his final essay, he has “always been a nationalist and believed that small nations have been less likely to be corrupt than large ones”^⁠ (2016a: 493).

The other aspect of Whyte’s analysis that speaks to Butler’s concerns is the way in which the Organization Man is both a product of, and yet also antagonistic to, different versions of Protestantism. As Mosse noted, Protestantism was central to the evolution of the discourse of respectability: “the overriding importance of the eighteenth-century Protestant revival – whether in the form of Pietism or Evangelicalism – for the history of respectability cannot be ignored” (2020 [1985]: 4). In his 1950 essay, “The Invader Wore Slippers”, Butler provided a devastating account of how respectability lubricated the collaboration of English Protestants with the Nazis in the Channel Islands. By allowing the residents considerable latitude and respecting the existing “social and racial hierarchies”^⁠, the Nazis showed that they and the English had commensurate notions of respectability (1986k: 107). This helped to secure the compliance with Nazi authority of a large swathe of the middle-class English Protestant population on the islands; as Butler succinctly put it: “[t]he Herrenvolk philosophy judiciously applied, as it was in the Channel Islands, can be swallowed easily enough if you have not too sensitive a digestion and belong to a ruling race yourself” (1986k: 106). Based on this example, Butler speculated that had the Nazis invaded Ireland they would have controlled the country by first manipulating and displacing nationalists, while “the respectable […], the Anglo-Irish Herrenvolk of Ulster and the Dublin suburbs, would prove the more satisfactory accomplices in establishing the German hegemony”^⁠ (1986k: 109).

At the same time, it was also in Protestantism that Butler looked for resources to counter the malign effects of the respectable Organization Man, holding that “[t]here has always been in Protestantism a rebellious anarchic streak which the Protestant defenders of the established order acknowledge with reluctance” (1986l: 216). This form of Protestantism, which he saw embodied in his Anglo-Irish heroes and in his vision of a self-confident, eccentric, eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish world, was rooted in the founding Protestant concept of private judgement. It was precisely this understanding of Protestantism that Butler believed his co-religionists in the Republic of Ireland lacked, as is evident in his waspish caricatures of them in his 1954 review essay, “Portrait of a Minority”. Instead of asserting their private judgement, and raising their voices against the grip that the Catholic Church was exerting on legislation in the new Irish state, particularly in areas such as divorce, censorship and the application of the Vatican’s Ne Temere decree (which insisted that the offspring of a ‘mixed marriage’ be brought up as Catholics), Protestants in the Republic of Ireland maintained a respectable silence and looked to bypass the impact of these laws through their links to Britain. In sum, Butler suggested that these middle-class Protestants were more comfortable in a state in which a Catholic version of Victorian respectability held sway than they would be in Northern Ireland, where many of their co-religionists professed a much less respectable brand of Presbyterianism^⁠ (1986g: 120-21). Butler, on the contrary, looked forward to a day in which there might be “a strong Ulster contingent in the Dáil”, which he thought would change the “whole character of Irish life” (1986g: 119).

However, if Butler saw Northern Ireland as a site in which a more jagged and truth-telling version of Protestantism found expression, his attitudes to that polity exposed problematic limits to his thinking about the role of religion in public life. While there are exceptions, such as his essay on Germany (Butler 1986c), most of Butler’s writings about Protestantism deal with scenarios in which it is a minority religion, and where private judgement marks out an ethics of speaking truth to power. This was not the case in Northern Ireland, which Donald Akenson described as “a semisacralized entity […] founded morally on the terms of the Ulster Covenant, and pragmatically on the promise that it would be a Protestant state for a Protestant people” (1992: 150). At the same time, there has long been a not-always-easy accommodation in Northern Ireland between a radical mode of Presbyterianism and the more respectable form it assumed when in political power, a point made by, amongst others, the historian A.T.Q. Stewart (1993: 83). Butler’s feelings about the political manifestations of the not-respectable strain of Protestantism in Northern Ireland were very conflicted, as can be evidenced in his comments on Ian Paisley (1926-2014), the epitome of Presbyterian plain talking. In 1968 he suggested in one document that Paisley was “mentally arrested” and “very babyish”^⁠ (manuscript copy of “Behind the Purple Velvet Curtain”, Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/391), while in another he hypothesised that Paisley and his followers would eventually end up in the USA, which was something to be regretted:

they’d be a great loss to Ireland. Fundamentalists just because they passionately believe what we no longer find believable, have wonderful courage and endurance. We really are almost dead people down here […]. I can’t conceive of any Protestant round here expressing any sentiment that would disturb a Catholic mouse (Letter to Mr. Ireland, 4 October 1968, Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/606/138).

As it happens, the Croatian case lay behind these two divergent perspectives, as they are taken from comments on Paisley’s use of Avro Manhattan’s work, and the fact that he had invited Manhattan to talk in Northern Ireland. In Catholic Terror Today (1969) Manhattan cites the Catholic Church’s collaboration with the NDH as irrefutable evidence of why Catholics should be kept away from political power, and Butler lists this book in a bibliography he drew up of texts on the compulsory conversion campaign, commenting, “[i]t is written with just anger and repudiation. In regard to his account of the Pavelic [sic] period […] I have not observed any mistakes. I think it should be taken seriously, despite its fury”^⁠ (Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/346). This is too generous – Manhattan’s work is little more than a sectarian screed, one that argues that if Catholicism is “permitted to grow”, it would do nothing other than “repeat all the horrors of the past. Since she and totalitarianism, like Siamese twins, cannot be separated”^⁠ (1969: 199). Nowhere perhaps are its prejudices more apparent than in its account of Northern Ireland, which is explicitly framed in terms of the Croatian experience: “as in Yugoslavia, we find once more that the Catholic Church is the principal instigator of the country’s division. Only that instead of being out to destroy the Orthodox Church, here she is determined to obliterate Protestantism, or, rather the province by which it is best represented, namely, Northern Ireland”^⁠ (1969: 203). This is a Northern Ireland beyond any sort of actual history; rather, it is the site of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of darkness (Catholicism) and light (Protestantism). Unsurprisingly, Manhattan ignored the fact of Protestant power in Northern Ireland, and so his version of the “Troubles” cast Protestantism as a minority religion fighting its corner against the overwhelming power of the Catholic Church on the island.

Butler was not wholly unconvinced by Manhattan’s argument and Paisley’s reading of it, opining elsewhere in the 1968 letter cited above that Paisley

may be right in thinking these things might happen in Ulster. History that is suppressed repeats itself. Our Catholic neighbours here are charming and friendly, in fact the best, but I found Croats the same and so were the pre-Hitler and post-Hitler Germans. The ‘niceness’ of the individual doesn’t tell one much about the future.

Really the point of the Croatian persecutions for us – and it was not lost on Paisley – is that the Vatican complicity was proved to the hilt (Letter to Mr. Ireland, 4 October 1968, Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/606/138; original emphasis).

This is a disheartening note, one in which there is a sense that sectarian barricades are being raised under the pressure of the growing Northern Irish crisis. Butler quite literally underlined his undermining of the local nationalism he espoused – the “us” marks a clear border between his co-religionists in the Republic and their potentially untrustworthy Catholic neighbours. Moreover, echoing Manhattan and Paisley, he elided the political issues shaping Northern Irish life and cast the degenerating situation there in portentous religious terms, rooted in a construction in which Protestantism in Northern Ireland is a minority religion on the island as a whole. In short, as Tobin noted, while he “did not excuse either their ignorance or their extremism, Butler could not bring himself to reject entirely the logic by which Ulster Protestants associated sectarian identity with political predisposition” (2012: 184).

If Butler’s analyses of Croatia and Ireland focused on the dismal consequences that ensued when Catholicism moved to the centre of political life, he also noted how, in other contexts, the discourse of respectability had facilitated a commensurately baleful collusion of Protestantism with political power. As such, his work can be read as suggesting that it was not the inherent nature of the rite that produced a deplorable politics, but the way that religions were employed as symbols of respectability to access and maintain power. Butler, on the contrary, ideally conceived of religion as a site of ethical truth-telling. However, this did not exclude it from playing a beneficial role in society: if it were blended with more utopian social thinking, he postulated that a “Christian, para-Christian or post-Christian community” might emerge, in which “we can best do our duty to our neighbours and offer protection to the innocent, the just, the wise” (Butler 1986b: 61-62). Having said that, the ecumenical basis of this vision might be queried, considering Butler’s hesitations to denounce the links between religion and politics in Northern Ireland. These suggest that he ultimately believed that Catholicism, in which a central organisation holds sway, lacked the resources of Protestantism, especially its ideal of private judgement, to play an enabling role in society.

Acknowledgements

The archival research for this article was made possible by a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. This paper also benefitted from a Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, where an earlier version of it was presented in autumn 2024.

Notes

[1] Anglo-Irish is a problematic descriptor, and not one Butler used consistently. As Roy Foster noted, he often felt “discomfort with the hyphenated identification ‘Anglo-Irish’ […]: he was committed at once to affirming his tradition and descent, and proclaiming its close connection to the life of Ireland” (2003: 41).

[2] When that name started to get “middle-class revivalist associations” they altered it to Wellesley (Butler 1986j: 51).

[3] “Ljeti 1917. srpskoj vladi i Jugoslavenskom odboru upućuje memorandum u kojemu traži sjedinjenje južnih Slavena, pri čemu je Srbiji dodijelio ulogu ‘prve među jednakima’ (Južnoslovenska politika u ratu, Nova Evropa, 1920, 11).”

[4] See, for instance, Butler (1986a; 1986d and 1986h).

[5] Transcripts of parts of the correspondence between Butler, The Standard and others about the case of Stepinac are provided as an Appendix in Butler 2016: 523-64.

[6] See, inter alia, Butler (2016j).

[7] Note from Hannah Arendt to Butler, 17 September 1965, Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/606/99. A subsequent letter from Butler to Arendt (2 March 1966) tells her that the article on Artuković is to be published in Contemporary Review (London) and The Churchman (USA). (Butler Papers, TCD MS 10304/606/105).

[8] Plessini (2004) provides a thorough overview of Mosse’s investigations into the “dialectical tension between violence and respectability” (226) in fascism, and points towards some notable critiques of Mosse’s approach.