1 Introduction
The historian A. T. Q. Stewart once observed that the political divisions in Northern Ireland are not the result of a misunderstanding between unionists and nationalists. Rather, the divisions are a consequence of unionists and nationalists understanding each other all too well. Both communities are adept at the translation and interpretation of the other sideâs messages.
Instead of extremists, who can be managed in a democracy, government
(wherever it resides) has to deal with two hostile populations who
cannot agree on definitions. Words like âdemocracyâ, âlibertyâ, ârightsâ,
âesteemâ become porous, and the parrot-cries of party no longer offer
any guide to truth. And no one involved in the situation can really be
impartial.
This, Stewart argued, was âthe labyrinth out of which the politicians must find a wayâ (2001: 180). The Northern Ireland problem, then, can be defined as a profound division over the ends of politics as well as the means to achieve them. These have been questions that political argument in Northern Ireland has been unable to resolve by reasoned debate. Equally, it has not proved possible to resolve them by political violence. Hence the 30-year impasse. Nevertheless, it has been the consistent objective of the British and Irish Governments â as it has been the consistent assumption of liberal opinion â that it is indeed possible to reach agreement on these questions. The Talks about the future of Northern Ireland, from which issued the Belfast Agreement, were based on a number of such expectations. Political negotiations on an inclusive basis would establish a new platform of tolerance from which progress could be made and would provide a form of political therapy through which a rational consensus on principles could be reached. Lasting political bargains would be struck in a satisfactory balance of gains and losses and on those foundations the Agreement implied the emergence of a new and stable political dispensation.
Recent works on Northern Ireland such as Ed Moloneyâs analysis of republicanism (2002) and Dean Godsonâs study of David Trimble (2004) have provided enormously detailed and insightful accounts of the peace process, based on intimate acquaintance with the main actors. There is little to be added by going over that ground again. However, there is further space for an examination of the disputed ideas that have contributed to the peace process as Richard Bourke (2003) and Adrian Little (2004) have shown and that is where this study attempts to make a contribution. Anxiety and expectation appeared to sum up the paradoxical experience of Northern Ireland after the Belfast Agreement. To explain that experience it is important to understand how current expectation has informed political anxiety and how current anxiety has informed political expectation. Both anxiety and expectation, of course, derive their substance from different readings of the past. The book is divided into three parts, each part consisting of three interconnected chapters. Each chapter follows a similar pattern. Alternative ways of interpreting political possibilities are stated and their respective merits considered in terms of the ambiguity of changing political relationships, an approach that is designed to reveal how old and new styles of argument interpenetrate. The motif is the motif of paradox and the chapters take as their guide Schopenhauerâs aphorism: âThis would be a glorious world in which the truth were in no way paradoxical; for then indeed beauty would be recognized at once and virtue would be easyâ (1988: 371).
In Part I, âConditionsâ, three chapters examine the Northern Ireland question in terms of recent historical, imaginative and political understandings, understandings that made any settlement of that question problematical. Chapter 2 examines two historical understandings that assert either that all politics is fated or that all politics is willed and open to choice. The first implies a tragic view of politics where action is compelled by the situation and the second implies an ethical view where responsibility for action is paramount. This chapter looks at these narratives of fate and choice and how they have woven themselves through the political condition of Northern Ireland. Chapter 3 assesses the view that politics in Northern Ireland has suffered from a lack of imagination, a lack that has fostered the negativity that so often is taken to define its condition. It argues that, contrary to that impression, Northern Ireland has suffered from the opposite condition, from an over-imagination that frequently borders on the fantastic and that these fantasies, or disconnections between means and ends, helped to sustain political violence for 30 years. Chapter 4 examines the politics of winning and losing. It considers the simplicity but also the difficulties of this style of thinking about politics and its consequences for long-term stability. The chapter argues that a substantial factor in the recent Troubles was the determination of unionism to avoid losing this time and the determination of nationalism to win this time. In both cases fate â the âendâ of history â played a large part in their respective calculations of political means.
In Part II, âModificationsâ, three chapters look at the Belfast Agreement in terms of changing ideas, structures and circumstances and the extent to which the Agreement modified the Northern Ireland condition. Chapter 5 explores the contribution to politics in Northern Ireland of new ideas about democratic participation and reviews recent re-evaluations of the potential for inclusive transformation made by advocates of dialogic democracy. It compares this idea of democratic transformation with the more familiar concept of a historic compromise between communal blocs. Chapter 6 is devoted to the archaeology of the Belfast Agreement itself and assesses its institutions in the light of previous attempts to deliver stability. Chapter 7 considers the extent to which that Agreement provided the basis for a new beginning, a sort of re-foundation of Northern Ireland politics, and the extent to which it (more modestly) modified the circumstances in which traditional styles of politics continued to be conducted.
Part III, âConsequencesâ, surveys the implementation and effect of the Agreement since 1998. Chapter 8 is an appraisal of the anxiety and expectation the Agreement provoked amongst unionists and nationalists. It assesses the ambiguous interaction of both anxiety and expectation within and between the two political communities and the impact they had on the strategies of the political parties. Chapter 9 looks at the effect of the politics of âconstructive ambiguityâ on the fortunes of the Agreement. Constructive ambiguity was that noble lie that would, it was hoped, secure the new condition of peace. Unfortunately, it could also be judged a calculated stratagem to betray and often it was difficult to distinguish between the two. This chapter reassesses the course of post-Agreement politics in terms of alternative readings of the noble lie. Chapter 10 attempts to summarize the new condition of Northern Ireland, the consequence of the modifications brought about by the peace process of the 1990s and the fitful experience of executive devolution after 1998. It re-examines the oppositions explored in the book and identifies no harmonious resolution but only the unavoidable paradoxes of Northern Ireland politics. A brief Afterword reflects on the prospects for resurrecting the institutions of devolution given the polarization of party politics by 2004.
Edna Longley has been critical of those who throw theory at Ireland, hoping bits of it will stick. Perhaps this book may be judged to suffer from that particular defect. Nevertheless, it has been written on the assumption that such theoretical throwing is a task worth doing not only to make sense of complex events but also to stimulate or provoke the work of others.
2 Fate and choice
The Owl of Minerva, according to Hegel, spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. We come to a fuller understanding of the character of a political era once its way of life has grown old (1952: 13). Any such exercise in the periodization of history â when does it start, when does it end? â is a very imprecise art and is open to all sorts of reservations and qualifications. In particular, the historian will be reluctant to put too much intellectual weight on the neatness that such periodization presumes. The enterprise is not without its utility, however, in that it can draw attention to what was distinctive, if not entirely representative, of a form of politics. There has been a tentative consensus amongst students of Northern Ireland politics that the Belfast Agreement of 10 April 1998 may be taken to mark the end of a particular era that began with the civil rights campaign in 1968 (see Holland 1999). These 30 years are popularly known as âthe Troublesâ or âthe recent Troublesâ in order to distinguish them from the political violence which attended the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s. There is greater reluctance to go further and to conclude that what the expression âthe Troublesâ designates â widespread political violence â cannot be entirely rejuvenated. Nevertheless, contemporary judgement echoes J. C. Beckettâs observation on the end of the earlier Troubles:
Though the settlement left a legacy of bitterness, issuing occasionally in local and sporadic disturbances, it inaugurated for Ireland a longer period of general tranquillity than she had known since the first half of the eighteenth century.
In very different circumstances and for very different reasons, the Belfast Agreement appeared to provide the potential for greater tranquillity in Northern Ireland than at any time since 1968. Political reflection started to engage with the question of endings and beginnings and academic analysis turned its attention to what might be meant in this situation by the notion of âthe end of Irish historyâ (Aughey 1998; Ruane 1999). In other words, as it became possible to understand the Troubles as part of the past, understanding of these years was correspondingly modified. The very notion of closure (however arbitrary that closure may be) gave to the last 30 years a shape that permitted a more detached assessment, what Hegel called a portrait of âgrey in greyâ.
This enterprise is both a necessary and a dangerous one. It is necessary because contemporary events affect the coherence of our view of the past and, in this sense, Zhou Enlaiâs celebrated judgement on the meaning of the French Revolution â that it is too early to tell â is less a witticism and more an historical truism. It is also dangerous because of the possibility of âpresentismâ, a reading of the past that already assumes the present, a notion that invites political manipulation. What common sense assumes is that the past is a realm of fact but in truth it inverts that assumption. Presentism makes the past into a realm of imagination, of half-truths and fabrications, of folk wisdom and, when politicized, folk wisdom then becomes a partisan narrative of necessity. In order to justify what we want to do in the present this is what the past must have been like. The greyness of the âfirst draftâ of history paints over the lurid and passionate colours of folk wisdom and of political necessity for the objective is to reconsider some of the dominant modes of thought that gave to this period its political shape. From the Owl of Minervaâs perspective, we can now cast a cold eye on the Troubles and, from our contemporary vantage point, re-examine what were commonly held to be its realities and to reassess that period in a manner that may help to illuminate the possibilities but also the limitations of politics in Northern Ireland after the Belfast Agreement. This is not a âWhiggish readingâ of the Belfast Agreement (Jackson 2003: 260). It is more of an anti-Whiggish reading that emphasizes the contingency of situations and the consequences of choice. This is important since a particular notion of history (even the âhand of historyâ) is thought to inform the necessary character of the Agreement.
The Agreementâs significance, it has been argued, lay not only in institutional structures but also in addressing the âlegacy of historyâ or even overcoming âthe burden of the pastâ. It was supposed to be, in this grander sense, a turning point, a new beginning, an opening to the future. Yet as Pridham has argued in another context, politics is never âborn of immaculate conceptionâ. Changes of the extent intimated in the Belfast Agreement can also be âan occasion for reconsidering the uncomfortable past as well as looking to the futureâ (Pridham 2000: 29â31). Pridhamâs main concern was the transition to democracy of Central and Eastern European countries during the 1990s. Those conditions and circumstances are very different from the situation in Northern Ireland, although one cannot miss a certain existential correspondence, a correspondence acknowledged by some of those engaged in negotiating the Belfast Agreement (Mansergh 1996: 209â10). For example, as it became clear that the negotiations were coming to a positive conclusion, David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) told television reporters that the Agreement was the local equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In terms of world historical significance this was an obvious exaggeration yet it is worth pursuing the analogy a little further in order to clarify this chapterâs intent.
In a poignant essay written in October 1989, the German novelist Christa Wolf recounted the difficulty that people in the former German Democratic Republic have had in finding a narrative, personal and collective, to make sense of their new situation and the problem of giving voice to their condition. For Wolf the task involved a difficult balance. It involved trying to make sense of 40 years of life without wiping out 40 years of history. Discovering a suitable narrative, she thought, would involve reviewing âthe basic assumptions and the unfolding of this history stage by stage, document by document, to evaluate its results and see how it meets the demands of the present dayâ (Wolf 1993: 301). Wolf was reminded of Chekhov for whom the intellectual task was to âsqueeze the slave out of himself drop by dropâ and she thought that there were positive signs in East Germany that people were indeed beginning to squeeze the slave out of themselves. Squeezing out the slave meant recovering a sense of intelligent choice and this depended on laying aside the temptation to think of history in terms of a law, of national destiny or of necessity. A healthy politics could only grow, she concluded, if âeveryone takes active responsibility for society in cooperation with everyone elseâ and history, when confronted honestly, would form part of that healthy narrative (Wolf 1993: 302). Above all, what needed to be confronted was a dismal culture of historical fate that seemed to justify everything and to explain nothing. In a rather different context, this was also the subject of W. G. Sebaldâs ironically titled On the Natural History of Destruction. Armed destruction is anything but ânaturalâ for it requires the active organization of destruction, and naturalizing its history is a way to escape responsibility for its effects and to suppress experience of it (Sebald 2003: 64). And we suppress experience by relaxing into the arms of fate. The central question here concerns the appropriate form of historical narrative, for how we remember the past is constitutive of our present identity and it also says much about how we can imagine our future. This is where history and politics unavoidably overlap and where, as Seamus Heaney put it, âhope and history rhymeâ.
These observations on Germany would, at first sight, appear to have little relevance to the condition of Northern Ireland. Who would say that its citizens do not know how to talk of their condition when âgiving voiceâ has been one of the most dynamic, publicly funded growth industries of the last 30 years? And, unlike Germany East or West, surely Northern Ireland has been mightily conscious of its past? Has not the historian, rather than the philosopher, been king? Has not politics in Northern Ireland been conducted in the idiom of historical justification and justification by history? Have unionists and nationalists not sought to allocate historical blame rather than to seek present compromise? This has produced a distinctive style. Self-pity (we have been grievously wronged by partition â the nationalist position; we have been grievously wronged by political subversion â the unionist position) and self-righteousness (our struggle is sanctioned by history â the nationalist position; our resistance is morally correct â the unionist position) fostered a discourse of grievance, a style of politics that has a long pedigree in Irish politics. For example, Stephen Gwynn thought that the Irish problem lay in âgenerations of political passion without political responsibilityâ and that condition, replicated in the last 30 years and compounded by political violence, provides an insight into the condition of Northern Ireland (Gwynn 1924: 197). And seen in that light, Wolfâs German question does not seem so far removed from the Northern Ireland question and from the challenges facing contemporary politics. In the Northern Ireland of the early 1990s, as Longley noted, âthe lid blew off as tightly sealed a society as any in eastern Europe: one sealed off by the introverted codes of its communitiesâ. As a consequence, a rather paradoxical situation developed in which âsocial change has been at once impelled and retarded by the exigencies of living in that explosionâ (Longley 1994a: 1â2). The large and difficult questions that a generation of violence has bequeathed may never be properly addressed and even if they are addressed the result may not be a happy one. But certain things may be explored by way of a beginning. One of the major questions is also one of the simplest questions: To what extent were the Troubles a matter of fate or to what extent were they a matter of choice?
Fate and choice
It is not at all convincing that the outworking of Northern Irelandâs recent past was either inevitable or that it was the consequence of some terrible fate. This remains the case even if, in the contest between fate and choice, most people are disposed to accept a pessimistic interpretation of the Troubles and, by contrast, to take a more optimistic view of contemporary possibilities. If something was inevitable one might assume that it was also expected. This was not the case. For example, reviewing public assumptions and expectations on the eve of the Northern Ireland crisis, Hugh Kearney has argued that the general impression was one of improvement and it was expected that old antagonisms were moving towards resolution. The violence of the next 30 years, then, âwas a future quite unforeseen in the 1960sâ (Kearney 2001: 115â16). Equally, a young historian studying the premiership of Terence OâNeill has written of the shock when surfacing from his immersion in the documents and papers of the period 1960 to 1969 âto recall the disaster that overtook Northern Ireland in the years followingâ (Mulholland 2000: xi). Not only do the following years take a shape that seemed inconceivable in the period that preceded it; the violence of those years also appeared incommensurate with the nature of the antagonisms that constituted âthe Northern Ireland Questionâ of its day. As has often been pointed out, the civil disturbances of the late 1960s repeated patterns of disorder elsewhere in Europe and the United States. Few had expected that political contestation about civil rights would give way to the sustained political violence of the next 25 years. In Coxâs view, the condition of the persistent paramilitary campaigns promoted its own fatalistic inversion. Very rapidly indeed, he argued, âthe Troubles had assumed their own deadly logic, and few now believed they would ever come to an endâ. Political violence became a natural way of life and people learned to live with it (Cox 1997: 672â3). The expectation that things could not be otherwise has its own history and there was a sorry experience of failed political initiatives to confirm the popular view of the problemâs intractability. Functioning constitutional politics, which assume a capacity to bargain over and to reach an accommodation between the claims of continuity and change, seemed ill-suited to the culture of Northern Ireland polarized further by paramilitarism. There had always been intractable constituencies within nationalism and unionism that denied the possibility of a trade-off between reform and stability, and these constituencies had become hardened by the continuation of political violence. There were sufficiently extremist constituencies within loyalism and republicanism that were now determined (and had the capability) either to frustrate change or to promote instability. But one should not confuse the determined campaigns of these paramilitary minorities with historical determination. It is important to recall how large were the constituencies prepared to accept the virtue, if not always the detail, of political accommodation. Opinion polls showed that power-sharing was widely and consistently acceptable to both unionist and nationalist voters, even if it was not necessarily their first choice (Whyte 1991: 82).
It became very easy, then, to accept a tragic vision of the conflict, a vision that was not without its own consolations. It was a vision that, for some, confirmed the exceptional nature of life in Northern Ireland and thereby contributed to their own sense of importance and self-worth. Instead of its accustomed provincial languor, Northern Ireland was now the focus of intense world attention. This fed the pretensions of those who considered themselves to be on a mission of historical redemption and of those who, like the Khan of Tartary, mistook their own world for the known world (Montesquieu 1993: 99). Furthermore, and exaggerating both importance and self-worth, there existed a pervasive feeling of victimhood, real and imaginary, that has been common to the cultures of unionism and nationalism (see Kennedy 1996: 182â223). Emotionally, this condition served to displace responsibility on to others. Politically, it encouraged a helpless attitude of going with the flow, an acceptance that the history of destruction all around was indeed ânaturalâ. The alternative to this tragic vision was a moralistic one, preaching the virtues of cooperation and the value of compromise that, in the circumstances of determined political violence, it was unable to deliver either. As a consequence, the moral vision tended towards a self-indulgence that was none other than the alter-image of the tragic vision. Indeed, it depended for its ver...
