Conflict to peace

Politics and society in Northern Ireland over half a century

Bernadette Hayes, Ian McAllister

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719097508
• eBook ISBN: 9780719099021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examines how and why the Northern Ireland conflict was resolved from the perspective of the general public, using dozens of public opinion surveys collected since 1968

1
Theoretical and practical perspectives

A common observation in comparative politics is that divisions within a society that cross-cut one another lead to moderation and compromise, while divisions that reinforce one another lead to extremism and conflict. This observation was first made when the stable, moderate, pluralist politics of the Scandinavian democracies was contrasted with the relatively unstable, divisive politics of some European countries, notably Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). However, it was also noted that in many of these countries, all of which were deeply divided on some combination of language, ethnicity or religion, institutional mechanisms had been put in place to manage the potential conflict these divisions generated. This gave rise to the theory of consociationalism, which is most closely associated with the work of Arend Lijphart¹ and is now commonly applied to societies emerging from deep-seated ethnic conflicts (see Rothchild and Roeder, 2005).

The theory of consociationalism argues that fundamentally divided societies can come together as a result of an elite agreement, whereby executive power is shared between competing groups. The premise is that no single group has a majority and can therefore govern in its own right, so the competing groups are forced to compromise or suffer immobilism. Consociationalism has been subject to widespread criticism since it was first developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.² However, few of its opponents disagree with the basic premise, namely, that reinforcing cleavages are the most difficult divisions to resolve and that they have major polarizing effects on the outlooks and behaviours of the communities that are affected by them.

Consociationalism had immediate attractions for those interested in understanding the nature of the Northern Ireland conflict and designing institutions that had a realistic chance of halting the violence. However, for much of the conflict, it was only one among a number of theories. Moreover, the majority position of the Protestant community and the presence of external actors, such as the Irish and British governments, meant that Northern Ireland did not meet the prima facie conditions for consociational institutions to succeed. Indeed, the intellectual debate over the theories that underlie the conflict has been an almost constant though barely visible companion to the physical conflict; John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary (2006a: 44) refer to this intellectual debate as Northern Ireland’s ‘meta-conflict’.

This chapter examines the theories that have been advanced to explain the conflict and how they have been translated into the design of political institutions. The first section examines the development of the theory of consociationalism and how it has been woven into the intellectual debate about the nature of the Northern Ireland conflict. We also examine the major criticisms of the theory. The various attempts to construct institutions to resolve the conflict are outlined in the second section, leading up to the 1998 Belfast Agreement. The 1998 Agreement and its aftermath is the topic of the third section, with a particular focus on the problems of implementing the main terms of the Agreement. The final two sections outline, respectively, the empirical base for our study and the content of the remaining chapters.

The consociational approach to conflict resolution

Consociational models of government became popular in the 1960s and 1970s as a means of governing deeply divided societies. It was initially developed in reaction to adversarial models of governance, such as those that had evolved from Westminster parliamentary practice, which it was argued exacerbated rather than ameliorated deep-seated conflict.³ The central principle of the model was that government should proceed through negotiation between the competing groups within the society, rather than through the decisions of the majority. Countries where this form of government was regarded as operating in various forms and at various times have included Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Bosnia and Lebanon (Coakley, 2010). The consociational model is, however, most frequently associated with the work of Arend Lijphart, who developed it in an article in 1969 and in a famous book on the Netherlands, The Politics of Accommodation (Lijphart, 1968a, 1969).⁴

Lijphart identified four basic principles that a consociational democracy must adhere to in order to overcome ethnic conflict (Lijphart, 1977: 25ff). These principles have largely been preserved in the scholarly work on the topic. The first principle is that government must be based on power-sharing between the main communities, in what he termed ‘government by grand coalition’. The second principle is that each community should have the right to veto any measure that might harm their interests. Third, all key positions in the government and the bureaucracy should be allocated proportionally to members of each community. Finally, each community should enjoy some degree of self-government over matters that do not affect the other communities. This principle is particularly pertinent for linguistically divided societies. While there has been much debate and revision concerning consociationalism since the 1970s, these principles still remain central to the model (see McGarry and O’Leary, 2006a, 2006b).

In the course of a 1975 article, Lijphart developed his ideas on consociationalism and how it might apply to Northern Ireland. However, by that time he noted that several of the key elements had already been integrated into the 1973–74 Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, the latter based on power-sharing between the communities. As John Coakley (2009) has convincingly argued, power-sharing was identified as essential to any future form of government as far back as 1969, even before the suspension of the Stormont parliament in 1972. It was given further momentum when it was advocated by John Whyte in a 1971 pamphlet which promoted the Swiss system of proportional representation in government as a possible model. The idea subsequently went through several more permutations, first being adopted by the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and then the Alliance Party in the 1970s, and then being discussed by various unionist groupings during the 1980s (Coakley, 2010: 12ff). By the mid-1990s, the power-sharing principle had been effectively accepted by all of the major actors in the conflict.

Consociational theory has generated a wide variety of critics since the 1970s, and those questioning its application to Northern Ireland have been particularly visible from the early 1990s onwards. These criticisms have broadly followed three lines of argument. First, it is suggested that power-sharing institutionalizes a conflict through setting quotas or mechanisms by which all groups are represented in government (Brass, 1991; Taylor, 2009a). In other words, the institutional arrangements that are created by the consociational model serve to reinforce the cleavages within the society, making them even more resistant to change. Ian Shapiro (1996: 102) puts it well when he says that rather than resolving the problem, consociationalism further exasperates ‘the malady it is designed to treat’. Indeed, even if the conflict were to moderate to such an extent that the power-sharing arrangements were deemed superfluous, path dependency would suggest that it would be difficult to unravel them.

A second line of argument concerns how other divisions within the society are treated and are effectively relegated to second-order issues. The focus on ethnic division often masks social inequalities within the society, such as those that are based on class or gender. It is the negation of these other potential forms of social division in favour of ethnic identity that many scholars see as the main disadvantage of consociational forms of government (see Taylor, 2009a). In defence of the consociational approach, McGarry and O’Leary (2009: 377–8) argue that if liberty and individual choice are maximized, then the risk that ethnic division will be ‘frozen’ by these institutional arrangements will be reduced.

A third line of argument questions the elite approach to managing divisions which is inherent in the model. A consociational approach assumes that political elites will form a grand coalition including all of the protagonists; such coalition arrangements are, in turn, the product of institutional design. Critics, such as Donald Horowitz (1990, 2000), argue that institutional design has little impact on mass attitudes and values and that a more effective approach is to focus on civil society initiatives and to devote resources to encouraging cross-community interaction. Such a ‘centripetal’ approach will therefore help to create a shared set of cultural values. Others, such as Rupert Taylor (2009a), have suggested that such elite politics is so divorced from the population’s everyday lives that it ignores the underlying nature of the society and has little chance of success. Taylor’s approach is to encourage support for civil society organizations which can ‘challenge and erode the clash of ethno-nationalisms and create new relationships of mutuality through networking and debate’ (Taylor, 2001: 47; cf. McGarry, O’Leary and Simeon, 2008).

Whatever the criticisms of the consociational approach and its application to the Northern Ireland conflict, intellectual opinion and those of the political class had, by the late 1980s, largely agreed that consociationalism offered the best hope for a lasting solution. In moving British and Irish government opinion in this direction, the work of John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary has been particularly influential. In turn, they have recognized that the Northern Ireland experience serves to revise consociational theory in important ways.⁵ They point particularly to the constructive role that external actors can play at crucial stages; in the Northern Ireland case, this role was fulfilled by the Clinton administration in the U.S. (Arthur, 2000). They also identify the need to integrate self-determination disputes into the model and to extend institutional design beyond the narrowly political. In the next section, we outline the evolution of political thinking about possible solutions to Northern Ireland in the three decades leading up to the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

The troubled road to peace

For most of the first half century of its existence, the institutions of governance in Northern Ireland were stable, even if they were not supported by the Catholic community. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act established a devolved legislature, with a cabinet and a prime minister modelled on Westminster. The parliament had the power to legislate on most major aspects of Northern Ireland life, the main exceptions being foreign relations, the armed forces, citizenship and some aspects of taxation.⁶ This arrangement suited successive British governments, who were relieved of any direct responsibility for governing the region and the accompanying risk of re-entanglement with the Irish problem. During the half-century life of the Stormont parliament, the British government withheld royal assent to just one piece of legislation – the removal of proportional representation in local elections – and then only temporarily. Devolution in Northern Ireland suited both the Ulster unionists and the British government.

In one important respect, the Stormont parliament did differ from the Westminster model: the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was permanently in government. This had a range of negative consequences, the most important being how the government and opposition behaved. The Unionist government was in practice unaccountable for its decisions, and as a result, successive governments engaged in numerous acts of discrimination against the Catholic minority, particularly at the local government level.⁷ For its part, the permanent minority position of the nationalist opposition meant that they had no incentive to engage in parliamentary politics as a ‘government in waiting’ in the Westminster model; as a result, they were often obstructive and even abstentionist in their legislative behaviour.⁸ While the devolved government established in 1921 effectively removed the Northern Ireland problem from British politics, its operation was highly dysfunctional. It was less a question of if its authority would be seriously challenged than when this would occur.

When the challenge came in the late 1960s, it was not in the form of parliamentary opposition from the Nationalist Party, or through a violent campaign orchestrated by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), but through peaceful street demonstrations. These were organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), a group founded in 1967. Consciously emulating the tactics of the U.S. civil rights movement and Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties, NICRA’s role was to document and publicize instances of individual or systematic discrimination against the Catholic minority. The inability of the police to respond effectively to street demonstrations organized by NICRA resulted in widespread violence and, ultimately, to the mobilization of British troops to keep order in August 1969. From that point on, the British government was again directly involved in the governance of Northern Ireland.

The initial British response was to press for reforms to deal with the most overt instances of discrimination. The Unionist prime minister, Terence O’Neill, implemented a series of reforms in November 1968, particularly relating to the contentious issue of the provision of public housing. These reforms were regarded as not far-reaching enough by civil rights activists and as a backdown by many of O’Neill’s own supporters. Following a general election in February 1969, when one-third of the unionists who were elected opposed O’Neill, he was forced to resign. Further unsuccessful attempts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Theoretical and practical perspectives
• 2 Religion
• 3 National identity
• 4 Constitutional preferences
• 5 Political parties
• 6 Community relations
• 7 Education
• 8 The legacy of political violence
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: Data sources
• References
• Index