The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (185 page)

The East-West conflict of the
Cold War
, with its emphasis on military aspects of security, appeared to give way, during the
détente
of the 1970s, to disagreements over the material preconditions of security and welfare in which the Soviet Union was regarded as belonging, along with the United States, Japan, and other relatively wealthy and industrialized states like Australia, to a metaphorical North, while the remaining states identified themselves, oppositionally, as the South. Negotiations during the 1970s over issues as diverse as trade, investment, intellectual property, and rights to sea-bed resources were known collectively as the North-South dialogue. By the 1990s the radical simplification of this opposition seemed less apposite because of the rise to wealth of former southern economies such as Taiwan, the acute economic decline experienced by the successor states of the ‘northern’ Soviet empire, and the redundancy of the East-West divide against which the South had originally defined itself.
CJ 

 
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Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom is easily misunderstood. It appears full of paradox: a successful implementation of the Westminster model that went horribly wrong; ultraloyal territory prepared to demonstrate its loyalty through acts of disloyalty; and a deeply conservative polity which (since 1972) has become an adventure playground for constitutional tinkering. Insofar as we can speak of the ‘settlement’ of the historic British-Irish conflict (embodied in the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921) it was a British success. Lloyd George's genius had been to extricate Britain from the Irish imbroglio at minimum cost. By establishing two parliaments and governments in Ireland he had quarantined the issue from British politics; reduced Irish representation at Westminster to 13 Northern Ireland MPs; and security control was transferred to indigenous forces. But the settlement did not alter the fact that the same actors remained with their conceptual approaches fundamentally intact. Part of the ambiguity lay in the transitional status of Ireland. The 1920 Act was about political pacification and its designers settled for the fashionable postwar device of partition. The first elections for the Northern Ireland Parliament established the dominance of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) winning almost 70% of all seats between 1921-69. They set about shaping it in their own image, a policy that met no resistance from Westminster where a philosophy of ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ was adopted.
Consequently it was fashionable to examine Northern Ireland as a peculiar form of devolution within the UK until the mid-1960s: indeed it was like an autonomous state with a federal relationship to the United Kingdom. It did not enjoy full legitimation and stability was ensured by a security policy in which citizens became accustomed to the belief that the rule of law could always be suspended. Westminster's limited control meant that it was a reasonably successful example of administrative devolution. The result was the absence of an informed Whitehall view of the more controversial aspects of Northern Ireland politics. This situation encouraged unionist illusions of self-sufficiency and it created unspoken separatist tendencies.
These tendencies were put to the test after the campaign for full civil rights for Catholics erupted in 1968 and led to inter-communal violence. Both governments were caught unawares. There had been minimal contact between North and South since 1922. Dublin had claimed Northern Ireland's territory and wrote this irridentism into its 1937 Constitution. There was low-level functional cooperation on matters such as energy, fisheries and railways. With scant knowledge of conditions on the ground Dublin was forced into acting as ‘second guarantor’ of a reform programme produced rapidly by the Wilson government (to respond to Catholic grievances). London reacted angrily by declaring that the Northern Ireland problem was purely an internal affair. Neither the reform programme nor a security response returned stability to the province and by March 1972 Stormont was prorogued and direct rule was imposed.
Increasingly London was reduced to using the instruments of war rather than those of civil administration. This set Northern Ireland apart from the rest of the UK. Violence was prevalent even before Northern Ireland had been established. Unionists had used it to resist the Home Rule threat in the period before the Great War. Nationalists retorted with the 1916 Rising. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) again mounted a violent campaign between 1956–62 but it failed to win popular (Catholic) support. So when the ‘Troubles’ erupted both communities reverted to familiar tactics. It was the incident known as Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) when the British Army killed thirteen unarmed Catholic protesters that the decision was taken that London could not rule by proxy. Catholics had withdrawn compliance from the state and Westminster politicians in the person of the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw , soon appreciated that Northern Ireland did not fit into the usual parameters of British political practice.
Direct rule was meant to be temporary but it was impossible to find political leaders who had the authority to speak unequivocally for their respective communities. In an attempt to build a ‘strong centre’ and weaken the Unionist monolith the government reintroduced proportional representation for Stormont elections — the Unionist government had abolished it in 1929. They succeeded in that the UUP held only about 23% of the popular vote by 1998. A March 1973 White Paper added to unionism's humiliation. The Stormont Parliament was to be an ‘Assembly’, the Cabinet an ‘Executive’, the office of Governor was to be discontinued and no more Privy Councillors were to be appointed. But the strong centre remained illusory and the ‘politics of the last atrocity’ endured. Whitehall veered between a security response and institutional tinkering. Between 1972–84 there were six successive sets of institutions, all of them based on an internal settlement. Only the 1974 power-sharing government that lasted five months, brought down by massive loyalist intimidation, began to address the fundamentals. The two communities were represented on it, it was answerable to London and it had an Irish dimension. So it encompassed the four contending parties and was a cautious attempt to probe their conceptual approaches. But it was ahead of its time because there was not sufficient trust between the governments; factionalism was rife in each community; and loyalist and republican paramilitaries were rampant.
By 1980, and under some international pressure, the governments began a series of summits that culminated in the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) in November 1985. Although deeply unpopular with unionists it had the merit of placing the conflict in its proper British-Irish context. The AIA had three features of note: it gave the Irish government a strong role (that fell short of joint authority) in the politics of Northern Ireland; it increased considerably British-Irish security cooperation; and its structures were flexible enough to withstand any sustained popular (Protestant) opposition. The IRA noted the significance of security cooperation — Sinn Fein had decided in 1986 to contest and take their seats in a Dublin parliament. This was hugely symbolic because, since partition, they had rejected Dublin rule as being illegitimate. Equally loyalist paramilitaries began to look for radical political alternatives to violence.
The Agreement was a watershed. It received international endorsement particularly from the United States and it was registered at the UN under Article 102 of the Charter. The failure of the unionist community to bring down the Agreement represented a milestone in British-Unionist relations. It was the first occasion in the last century that London had withstood their pressure on a vital constitutional matter. The final realization that power resided in London (and Dublin) led to significant attitudinal change over time. It registered in two 1987 think-pieces, the UDA's Common Sense (1987) and a DUP/UUP joint report The Way Forward. Politics was moving from zero-sum to inclusion and process for the first time ever in Northern Ireland. Despite continuing violence historic talks occurred between Sinn Fein and the SDLP during 1988. They did not succeed but neither did they fail and they were to be resurrected in the 1990s in the Hume /Adams talks. Attempts to remove unionism from its internal exile (in protest against the AIA) began in 1989 through the Secretary of State, Peter Brooke and his successor from 1992. In the meantime the IRA held secret talks with an emissary of the British government between 1990–93. The outcome was the December 1993 Downing Street Joint Declaration signed by the British and Irish prime ministers. It was a deliberate piece of tortuous syntax with one aim in mind - to persuade the IRA to cease-fire. That happened on 31 August 1994 followed by a loyalist cease-fire on 13 October. But it was to be a hiatus. One of the flaws of the Joint Declaration was its ambiguity on decommissioning. During 1995 the British government made decommissioning of paramilitary weapons a precondition for entering all-party talks. The IRA reacted by planting a bomb in Canary Wharf in February 1996 and the cease-fire was at an end.
During 1995 both governments had published the ‘Joint Framework Document’ to establish accountable government in Northern Ireland and to ‘ ... assist discussion and negotiation involving the Northern Ireland parties’. In November they launched a ‘twin track’ process to make progress in parallel on decommissioning and all-party negotiations. An international decommissioning panel, chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell , was created. Despite the IRA breakdown a constitutional architecture (for a new Northern Ireland and for relations within the archipelago) was in place with substantial international endorsement. The missing links for success were an IRA commitment to peace and the political will in Britain to push through an inclusive package. The latter became possible after Labour's overwhelming victory in the May 1997 general election: the former followed. Blair set the multi-party talks for one year later with George Mitchell chairing. The Belfast Agreement was finally reached on 10 April (Good Friday) and was endorsed by 71.1 per cent of the North's electorate and 94.39 per cent of the Republic's voters on 22 May 1998.
The 1998 Agreement revisited the problems identified in 1920 with a stronger sense of realism. It was an acknowledgement that the problem was British-Irish and that the first version of Northern Ireland had not worked. It recognized the three strands to the solution: relations within Northern Ireland; those between North and South; and relations between Britain and Ireland - all of these playing alongside developments in British devolution and in the EU. It gave the people of Northern Ireland the right to determine their constitutional future through a more inclusive range of political opinion. And it placed proper emphasis on equity, diversity and human rights issues. By the turn of the century Northern Ireland might still be a place apart within the UK but the agreement was being heralded as a model for other societies coming out of conflict.
PA