Consociational Theory
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Consociational Theory

Rupert Taylor

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Consociational Theory

Rupert Taylor

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About This Book

Consociational power sharing is increasingly gaining ground, right around the world, as a means for resolving political conflict in divided societies. In this volume, edited by Rupert Taylor, nineteen internationally-respected scholars engage in a lively debate about the merits of the theory underlying this approach.

The volume focuses specifically on one of the leading cases under the global spotlight, the Northern Ireland conflict, and brings together the most prominent proponents and opponents of consociationalism. Northern Ireland's transition from war to peace is seen by consociationalists as flowing from the historic Belfast Agreement of 1998, and specifically from the Agreement's consociational framework. The Northern Ireland case is marketed by consociationalists as representing best practice, and as providing a template for ending conflicts in other parts of the world. However, as this volume interrogates, on what grounds, and to what extent, can such a positive reading be upheld?

Taken as a whole, this volume, structured as a symposium around the highly-influential argument of John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, offers comparative, engaging, and critical insight into how political theory can contribute to the creation of a better world.

Consociational Theory is an important text for anyone with an interest in political theory, conflict resolution in divided societies, or Irish politics.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2009
ISBN
9781134087600

Part I
Argument

1 Power shared after the deaths of thousands

John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary

We must not allow our justified loathing of the horrors and tragedies of the past to become a barrier to creating a better and more stable future for our children.
(Rev. Ian Paisley, MP, MLA, Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, March 26, 2007)
We are very conscious of the many people who have suffered. We owe it to them to build the best possible future. 
 It is a time for generosity, a time to be mindful of the common good and of the future of all our people.
(Gerry Adams, MP, MLA, President of Sinn FĂ©in, March 26, 2007)
It’s a deeply divided society, it continues that way. While one can agree on political and security measures, it takes a very long time, generations perhaps, to change people’s hearts and minds. So while this is a very important step, no-one should think that trust and love is going to be breaking out tomorrow between the two communities in Northern Ireland. That will take a long time, but this is a tremendous step forward.
(Senator George Mitchell, March 26, 2007)
You’ll never know the hurt I suffered, nor the pain I rise above,
And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love,
And it makes me feel so sorry,
Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats,
Blowing through the letters that we wrote,
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
(Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind,” Blood on the Tracks, 1974)
Before the dust settles on the bloody tracks left by political partisans in Northern Ireland over the last 30 years one last discussion of political prescriptions for the region may be intellectually fruitful. We begin from the premise that democracies have two broad and principled choices for managing diversity that are compatible with liberal values. Integration is one. Integrationists aspire to construct a single public identity. Since they believe that inter-group conflict results from group-based partisanship in political institutions they link diagnosis and prescription. To avoid a partisan state, integrationists condemn ethnic or religious political parties or civic associations, and praise the virtues of non-ethnic or cross-ethnic agendas officially promoted by the Conservative or Labour parties in Great Britain, or by the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States.1
Integrationists favour electoral systems that discourage the mobilization of parties around national, ethnic, religious, or cultural differences. They usually reject proportional electoral systems, which they think facilitate communal appeals, and favour rules which require winners to achieve majority or plurality support, usually in single-member districts. They endorse executive institutions that favour candidates who rise above religious, linguistic, and ethnic “factions.” They frown on the delegation of public policy functions to minority nationalities, or ethnic or religious communities, and oppose publicly funded religious school systems, and forms of autonomy based on “groups.”2 Integration is the preferred policy of most democratic states and international organizations, and the dominant approach among academics who study national, ethnic, and religious conflicts, especially in North America. Integration is often preferred by dominant communities within states, but also by small, dispersed minorities, such as immigrant communities, or “middlemen” minorities who cannot aspire to a state of their own.
Accommodation is a second option for democracies with multiple peoples. The housing metaphor indicates the goal of encompassing dual or multiple public identities in many-roomed political mansions. Three types of accommodation are distinct, though they can be combined, namely territorial pluralism (i.e. the combination of territorial self-government for regions and power sharing in the federal or union government); credible multiculturalism (i.e. proportional representation of groups in common institutions and self-government in their cultural affairs); and, consociational3 or centripetal power sharing.4 Consociational power sharing accommodates groups by voluntarily including all sizeable communities in executive and legislative institutions; by promoting proportionality throughout public administration, including the electoral system, security systems, and the courts; and through granting communities autonomy in their distinctive affairs. In more rigid consociations minority vetoes are built into the constitution or law making. Centripetalists promote vote-pooling electoral systems that facilitate or mandate the election of moderate ethnic politicians, those who are capable of reaching out to other ethnic communities. They reject the proportional electoral systems associated with consociation, seeing these as conducive to the election of ethnic radicals. Centripetalists support power sharing based on inter-ethnic coalitions of moderate parties.
Integrationists and accommodationists usually have rival views of the roots of national, ethnic, and communal conflict. Integrationists invariably insist that identities are malleable, fluid, soft, or transformable, whereas accommodationists think that in certain places and times they may be inflexible, resilient, crystallized, durable, and hard.5 In the accommodationist perspective, political prudence and morality requires considering the special interests, needs, and fears of distinct groups so that they regard the state as fit for them. Accommodating groups, particularly through consociation and territorial pluralism, are less popular with most established states than integration, because most states prefer the ideal of the nation-state, and it is less popular in the academy, which is saturated with the assumptions of the nation-state when it is not cosmopolitan by persuasion. But accommodation is often the first or second preference of minorities, particularly sizeable minorities that cannot easily win their own sovereign states.6
Integration and accommodation constitute among the most important democratic design choices in deeply divided places. In Northern Ireland, political and academic debate has cut across these boundaries, ranging consociationalists against integrationists and centripetalists. The debate has dominated the political science literature on Northern Ireland, permeating “[it] to such an extent that it can rarely be avoided by students of Northern Irish politics.”7 The debate is intricately connected to the fact that, since April 10, 1998, Northern Ireland has had a squarely consociational Agreement, with federal and confederal characteristics, which make its institutions both consociational and territorially pluralist. Criticisms and defences of the Agreement, as well as more detached evaluations, are usually conducted through consociational and integrationist or centripetalist lenses. This collection fits this pattern, though we also emphasize the Agreement’s federal and confederal character.

The Agreement’s integrationist and centripetalist critics

Three varieties of integrationist critics of the Agreement may be identified, who may be irritated mightily to be classed within the same normative orientation. We respect their right to call themselves whatever they want, and expect them to disagree with our summaries, though we will be interested to see how they reject the idea that they are integrationists.

Republicans (Irish civic nationalists)

From its inception, among the United Irishmen, Irish republicanism has sought to include Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter within the common name of Irishman. Today Irish republicanism seeks also to include women, non-believers, and non-Christians. The sincerity of these civic commitments should not be doubted, even if they have not always been upheld in political action or daily practice. Republicanism derives from political thinkers who considered the conditions under which city states, or agrarian republics, would flourish, notably NiccolĂČ Machiavelli, James Harrington, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant, who all thought citizens needed sufficient property and sufficient equality to be sturdy and independent of the state and oppressive social organizations.8 Civic virtue among citizens was best promoted through a common and deliberative public culture. Shared citizenship, education, language, religion, and military service for the republic would integrate the polity.9 In modern times republicans have sometimes veered toward what is sometimes called “integral nationalism.” In all cases they oppose group-based remedies to address disadvantage.10 They champion the nation of individuals, and promote integration as a prelude to assimilation. The clearest examples of such republicanism are found in contemporary France and Turkey: Jacobinism and Kemalism are bedfellows.11
In Ireland “rejectionist republicans” are defined by their approach to the Agreement. They include Republican Sinn FĂ©in, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, and their respective military wings, the Continuity and Real IRAs. Their goals are supported by some academics and intellectuals, some connected with The Blanket,12 who argue that unionists have a soft political identity, maintained by the presence of the British state. They have a shared agreement that there is but one nation in Ireland. They regard the Agreement as profoundly counterproductive: it entrenches British rule in Ireland, and supports the view that Ireland is politically divided between two sectarian communities. The Democratic Unionist Party–Sinn FĂ©in pact over power sharing has been described by one rejectionist republican as a “sectarian carve up between two ethnic dictators.”13 Rejecting the Agreement is commended, followed by the withdrawal of the British state from Northern Ireland and the incorporation of all of its citizens into a 32-county Irish republic. Some though not all republican rejectionists support the use of force to achieve these ends.

Civic unionists (British civic nationalists)

“Unionist rejectionists,” including those in Robert McCartney’s United Kingdom Unionist Party (UKUP), and the short-lived Northern Ireland Unionist Party (NIUP), share many of the intellectual convictions and habits of mind of the civic republican tradition, including that of their Irish rivals. They maintain that most Catholics would be happy to be citizens of the United Kingdom, provided their individual rights and culture were protected. In some accounts, provided a united Ireland was clearly not a realistic constitutional alternative, then Catholics would reconcile themselves to the Union.14 Integration with Great Britain is promoted as the correct political goal rather than the Agreement’s institutions, which are said to encourage Catholics to look to Dublin and to threaten the British civil liberties of all Northern Ireland’s citizens. Strong unionist integrationists reject substantive devolution or territorial decentralization within the Union of any sort, with or without power sharing. They are exemplars of what Iain McLean has called “unionism without the Union,” a dying breed in his view.15 They think that territorial self-government should be minimalist, such as that in London or Wales, and should not jeopardize the benefits of the centralized Union.16

Post-national transformers

Among the academic left and in small parties from outside the ethno-national blocs, including the Alliance, Democratic Left, the Labour Party, and the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, there is a political perspective that emphasizes the need for Northern Ireland’s “society” to be transformed from the bottom up – and which complains that consociationalists are (analytically) elite focused and (normatively) elitist. “Transformers” typically blame regional divisions on social segregation, economic inequality, and ethnocentric appeals by political elites in both communities. They argue that the elite-negotiated Agreement has refocused politics on divisive constitutional questions, which has obscured cross-cutting (“bread and butter”) issues based on class.17 Transformers call for public policies to promote social integration,18 e.g. increased public spending to tackle the (presumed) “material basis” of sectarian identities,19 and for support to be given to (progressive) civil-society organizations prepared to challenge sectarian elites.20 Among transformers we include Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd who are exponents of emancipation, i.e. emancipation from existing conflictual identities.21 Some other emancipationists seem optimistic about the prospects for transformation because they believe that sectarian divisions are superficial, the product of manipulative elites. Robin Wilson, selectively citing some data, observes that most people see themselves as neither unionists nor nationalists,22 while Rupert Taylor argues that voluntary associations have succeeded in producing an “erosion of ethno-nationalism on both sides, a fading of Orange and Green, in favour of a commonality around the need for genuine structures of democracy and justice.”23 In Taylor’s view, transformation is a prerequisite for a lasting political settlement. The Agreement is counterproductive because its consociational, segregationist logic makes transformation impossible.24 Other supporters of social transformation, by contrast, including Lord Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, and members of the Democratic Left and the Alliance, have accepted the Agreement has pr...

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