Mediating Power-Sharing

Devolution and Consociationalism in Deeply Divided Societies

Feargal Cochrane, Neophytos Loizides, Thibaud Bodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351250542
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

This book focuses on the design and operation of power-sharing in deeply divided societies.

Beyond this starting point, it seeks to examine the different ways in which consociational institutions emerge from negotiations and peace settlements across three counter-intuitive cases – post-Brexit referendum Northern Ireland, the Brussels Capital Region and Cyprus. Across each of the chapters, the analysis assesses how the design or mediation of these various forms of power-sharing demonstrate similarity, difference and complexity in how consociationalism has been conceived of and operated within each of these contexts. Finally, a key objective of the book is to explore and evaluate how ideas surrounding power-sharing have evolved and changed incrementally within each of the empirical contexts. The unifying argument within the book is that power-sharing has to have the capacity to adapt to changing political circumstances, and that this can be achieved through the interplay of formal and informal micro-level refinements to these institutions and the procedures that govern them, that allow such institutions to evolve over time in ways that increase their utility as conflict transformation governance structures for deeply divided societies.

This book fills the gap in the published literature between theoretical and empirical studies of power-sharing, and will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, consociationalism, European politics and IR in general.

1 Devolution and power-sharing in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been at the centre of debates on political institution building in divided societies for many years, especially with regard to the benefits or drawbacks of power-sharing based on consociational political institutions. This was marked by two general phases. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, there was significant opposition from within the unionist community to the very concept of power-sharing. Democracy was conceived in majoritarian terms as it operated in the Westminster model and prior to devolution being granted to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Under this model of representative government, the party with the largest number of seats generally formed a single-party government or voluntary coalition administration. The concept of power-sharing was publicly repudiated by mainstream unionist politicians during this period as being anti-democratic or evidence of sympathy to Irish nationalism. Former Ulster Unionist Party MP Enoch Powell referred to ‘that abominable absurdity of power-sharing, intolerable to any good democrat’, during a debate in the House of Commons in 1978 on the renewal of emergency legislation to continue direct rule from Westminster.¹ Speaking in the same parliamentary debate, Bill Craig, MP for East Belfast and leader of the Vanguard Unionist Party, commented, ‘There can be no parliamentary government in Northern Ireland that is not based on majority rule. The sooner that lesson is taken on board by all concerned, the better it will be for those who genuinely seek peace and stability.’² During this period in the Northern Ireland conflict, phrases such as ‘power-sharing’ and ‘devolution’ were loaded with political tension as they acted as coded signals for wider unionist and nationalist opposition over constitutional reform and control. The exception to this came during the 1973–1974 period with the emergence of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and subsequent Power-Sharing Executive in 1974, when moderate unionists led by the former Northern Ireland prime minister Brian Faulkner went into devolved government with moderate nationalist parties and the non-aligned Alliance Party on a power-sharing basis. This initiative disintegrated shortly afterwards due to unionist opposition, and set the tone for future political attitudes towards devolved government for the rest of that decade.

Times change, of course, and this eventually moved into a second phase, where unionists came to accept power-sharing in the context of a broader peace process during the 1990s. This moved in parallel with the progress of the multi-party negotiations during the 1990s that culminated in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement³ (GFA) in 1998. At this point, the principle of devolved government based on power-sharing was overtaken by arguments over how this should be done, which parties should be involved in the sharing of power and the particular modalities linked to the operation of the new institutions. Unionists moved forwards on the basis of sharing power with the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), rather than with the more radical Sinn Fein. Eventually, in 2007, following further periods of negotiation, unionists finally agreed to share power with Sinn Fein under the rules agreed in the Good Friday Agreement reached in 1998 and as amended in the St Andrews Agreement of 2006.

Since this point, there has been an energetic debate, both at party political and scholarly levels, as to whether the power-sharing structures are working effectively, or whether alternative approaches to the devolution of power would be preferable. The tensions between advocates/critical admirers and scholarly opponents of the GFA have circulated for a number of years and remain unresolved. The former claim the system provides minority safeguards against domination by the majority, while offering incentives for cross-community co-operation. The latter argue that this form of accommodationist power-sharing enshrines sectarian divisions in government and ultimately precludes cross-community co-operation or effective reconciliation (Horowitz, 2002; Taylor, 2009).

On the one hand (and notwithstanding their collapse following the 2 March 2017 Assembly Election), the region’s power-sharing institutions have been relatively successful in securing political stability since 1998, despite the intermittent setbacks. Northern Ireland’s d’Hondt system, which entitles the main parties to automatic representation in government on the basis of their electoral strength, is also critically important for consociational theory and is considered an attractive option in ongoing negotiations in Nepal, Cyprus and Colombia, among other countries. Yet in the eyes of its critics, Northern Ireland’s ‘government without opposition’ form of power-sharing has been unable to build sufficient political legitimacy or transcend its deep inter-communal divisions.

Looking at the history of power-sharing in Northern Ireland for the past two decades as well as drawing on the private members’ Opposition Reform Bill, which passed into legislation in March 2016, we focus on the empirical and normative challenges associated with re-negotiating the practice of consociational government in deeply divided societies. The desire for such re-negotiation emerges both from disagreement and conflict over the workings of such structures as well as the inevitable political evolution of these regions over time. Recent evidence from Northern Ireland demonstrates the limits of formal approaches to institutional change and highlights the need for informal practices to move in tandem with statutory reform in a contested political space. Northern Ireland demonstrates that power-sharing can evolve and mutate beyond its original design in response to the changing political context, and via a combination of formal and informal processes.

This chapter (along with the others in this volume) suggests that there is viable political space to be occupied, that bridges between the binary points of advocacy of power-sharing on the one hand and rejection of it on the other, as the basis for political settlements within divided societies. We offer the idea that there is a fluid boundary between the accommodationist approach of consociationalism and the integrationist model that denies the utility of power-sharing as a route to the peaceful transformation of violent conflict in deeply divided societies. The Northern Ireland case demonstrates that the ambitions of consociational power-sharing went far beyond an accommodationist vision in theory, but have been pulled towards this in practice.

The chapter connects to the others in this volume across three key areas: firstly, it provides an analysis of the formal and informal evolution of power-sharing and the combination of these patterns on the operation of the political institutions in the region. Secondly, the chapter provides empirical detail on the nature and functionality of a proportional political system in contrast to disproportional systems considered in other chapters. Thirdly, the chapter assesses the ways in which power-sharing in Northern Ireland has been affected by both endogenous and exogenous dynamics. The endogenous aspect relates to the internal political relationships between the main political parties and their wider electoral support. The exogenous dynamics are provided by the role of the UK and Irish governments on the operation of the political institutions and especially, by the UK referendum on membership of the European Union on 23 June 2016 and the aftermath of that vote. As with the other nations discussed in this volume, this changing external environment has had significant impacts on how power-sharing is understood in Northern Ireland and this will continue to affect how the institutions evolve over time.

Before looking at these themes, however, it is first important to assess the nature of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and the utility of the political institutions that emerged from the Good Friday Agreement after 1998.

Good Friday reconsidered

In institutional terms, the Good Friday Agreement combined elements of both classic and liberal consociationalism. Associated with Arend Lijphart (1977, 2004), consociationalism in its classic form emphasises community rights and minority vetoes; in Northern Ireland, this takes the form of community designation and cross-community voting. Following elections, Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) have to designate themselves as unionists or nationalists in order to operate the cross-community power-sharing principles within the political system. A default classification of ‘Others’ is available for those unwilling to designate themselves as part of one or the other of the ethnonational groups. Approved bills require the concurrent majority consent of both community blocks represented in the Legislative Assembly. At the same time, through the d’Hondt mechanism, membership in the Executive is automatically determined by electoral strength. Until the last mandate that began after the assembly elections of 6 May 2016, this included all political groups reaching the minimum threshold of representation in the assembly (McGarry & O’Leary, 2004; McEvoy, 2014). While the last mandate ended prematurely, due to the resignation of the deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness (now deceased) causing an Assembly Election on 2 March 2017, the May 2016 mandate is, at the time of writing, the last fully operational period of the political system in NI.

With its use of the d’Hondt system to allocate seats in the Executive, power-sharing in Northern Ireland has been described as a novel and liberal form of consociationalism (McCulloch, 2013; McGarry, et al., 2001). For one thing, there are no fixed posts assigned to specific ethnic or religious groups, as in the Lebanese form of consociationalism, nor are there provisions for equal numbers of ministers from each main community, as in Belgium, nor are there separate electoral rolls, as in South Tyrol or the 1960 Cypriot constitution (McGarry & Loizides, 2015). For another, by including all major parties in the allocation of cabinet seats (up to May 2016), Northern Ireland’s d’Hondt system eliminated a problematic and time-consuming aspect of consociationalism, that of forming inter-ethnic majority coalitions. This straightforward and inclusive mechanism led Northern Ireland to an unprecedented level of political stability from 2007 to 2017, though this remains brittle and subject to intermittent crises, as outlined below.

In general, the critical challenge for divided societies is to institutionalise a broadly inclusive, functional and legitimate coalition representing all groups that is not significantly different from the composition of their respective populations. Although there are several examples – from Belgium, Switzerland and, of course, Northern Ireland – the latter model is the most formalised, quicker to form and suitable for low-trust environments. More specifically, Northern Ireland stands out across alternative power-sharing models in combining inclusivity and proportionality, with automaticity in the formation of its executive (McEvoy 2015). This unique feature links government formation to an arithmetic algorithm, but at the same time, it disincentivises long-term coalition strategy-building over policy issues or even an outline consensus over a programme for government. In other words, parties can remain in a competitive oppositional mode rather than moving towards a co-operative or partnership relationship, because they have little need to reach policy agreements before taking office. Rather, they may have a greater need to emphasise what divides them than what unites them, continuing on from recent election campaigns, as access to governmental office is not contingent on reaching policy agreements with other political parties. This system therefore provides few incentives for parties to build coalitions with prospective partners in government over policy agendas. In practice, this has led to an efficient technical mechanism for appointing the Executive from the elected Legislative Assembly, but not always with great clarity over policy priorities or political direction once formed.

Framing the Northern Ireland context

Northern Ireland’s ‘peace process’ has lasted for a generation; 2017 marked the 24th anniversary of the Downing Street Declaration, which cemented the foundation for the joint approach to the conflict by successive British and Irish governments, and the 23rd anniversary of the main paramilitary ceasefires. The 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which framed the broad political and constitutional geometry for today’s system of devolved government, will occur in April 2018. We have had a system of devolved power-sharing in Northern Ireland for a generation (albeit with several periods of hiatus and inertia, including the present one, in the wake of the 2 March 2017 Assembly Election). Given this generational time frame, and on the cusp of the 20th anniversary of the GFA, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the experience of power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

The key questions to ask are: firstly, to what extent has the consociational architecture successfully managed the conflict in Northern Ireland? Secondly, what more might be done to consolidate its strengths and remedy its weaknesses? Such determinations depend, of course, on what benchmarks we use to evaluate success and failure, including institutional robustness, the curbing of violence and reasonable levels of functionality in the political system and its associated institutions, as well as broader issues of public support.

Simply stated, the GFA recognised the political realities of enduring ethno-nationalist political divisions and broader politico-cultural sectarianism, and built a range of political institutions based on consociational democracy to manage these tensions and disagreements – leaving intractable ones out. It was an institutional bargain between the main representatives of the unionist and nationalist communities. And it was an effective one – recognised as such by 71% of the electorate in the May 1998 referendum (Mitchell, 2001: 30). This electoral result legitimised the implementation of the GFA, but the devolved structure was not so successful – suspended four times between 1999 and 2002, with a hiatus from 2002 to 2007. At the time of writing (September 2017), another period of political instability has been generated as a result of disagreements between Sinn Fein and the DUP before and after the Assembly Election of 2 March 2017. It is currently unclear if the parties will return to devolved government, or whether direct rule will be restored in the absence of power-sharing structures operating at Stormont. The outcome of the Westminster General Election on 8 June 2017 may act as a further barrier to the restoration of power-sharing in NI as the DUP agreed to a command and supply arrangement with the Conservative Party government in London. The ‘deal’ between the DUP and the current government is unlikely to augment the confidence of the political actors in NI, or the already strained relations between the DUP and Sinn Fein.

As the bumpy road suggests, despite achieving the support of both unionists and nationalists in 1998, the peace process has faced repeated challenges, including the ambivalent commitment of unionist parties and their broader electorates, the slow pace of change evidenced through the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the inability to deal effectively with the past. In the final analysis, the record is mixed – as we might expect of a society coming out of political violence.

Despite the setbacks highlighted above, the majority of political parties in Northern Ireland have come to agree on a political geometry based on power-sharing and an Irish dimension. Today, the comparison of unionist political voices with their predecessors from the 1970s and 1980s, provided at the beginning of this chapter, is stark. All of the main unionist political parties accept (and even embrace) the concept of power-sharing and devolution, and they mostly find the Irish dimension as set out in the GFA unproblematic as well.

The problems that divide the unionist and nationalist political parties and their respective electorates are defined more in terms of identity politics and the difficulty of coming to terms with legacy issues from the conflict than with top-line constitutional issues such as power-sharing or institutions that connect Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

A caveat to add here is that the UK referendum on EU membership held on 23 June 2016 holds the potential for the constitutional issue to re-emerge as a barrier to power-sharing being re-established or functioning smoothly in Northern Ireland. Despite the Brexit issue and the current hiatus in the operation of the devolved institutions, power-sharing in Northern Ireland has played a large role in reducing political violence, (especially fatalities), maintaining political stability and promoting the region’s economic viability. Overall, the political institutions in Northern Ireland have done well in their short-term conflict management goals, despite being less impressive in transforming the wider conflict. The institutions clearly need to do more to convert short-term gains int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Devolution and power-sharing in Northern Ireland
• 2 ‘Living consociationalism’ in the Brussels Capital Region
• 3 A federal Cyprus? Integrating alternative power-sharing models
• Conclusion
• Index