The votes in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland on May 22nd, 1998 have in effect been a collective constituent or even revolutionary act. The Belfast Agreement has been ratified by a vast majority of the Irish people and the people (or peoples) of Ireland have agreed formally to live both together and separately. The constitutional relationships between Britain and Ireland and between the two parts of Ireland have changed profoundly.
Some agreement of this kind has been desired, often incoherently, for a long time, but it would have been unimaginable 40 years ago. Something like it was envisaged by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December, 1921, but it never came to anything because of the intransigence of not only unionists but also of nationalists. Irish politicians North and South, and Irish political culture North and South, were not, at that time, capable of negotiating or working such an agreement. In part this was because the South split and had an appalling civil war; more fundamentally it was because the fledgling Irish Free State was powerless, whereas Great Britain was not only the local superpower, but was also a world superpower.
Both parts of Ireland experienced civil war: a short, vicious and bitter one in the south in 1922-23, and a long, slow-moving and deeply tragic one in the North from 1920 to 1923 and from 1969 to 1994. Both conflicts resulted in part from a tacit or even explicit refusal to accept politics as a means of achieving peace and a tolerable set of relationships between peoples with apparently irreconcilable aspirations and purposes. In the South, the civil war was fought between groups who actually differed rather little in the political ends that they sought, but who differed passionately as to the means that they recommended to the people.
In the South, in the beginning was the oath. Idealists would not take an oath of allegiance to the king, and even though it was pointed out that the actual oath was one of fidelity rather than allegiance, many refused it on the grounds that it betrayed their oaths to the Republic of 1916 or 1919. Others simply denounced it as an imposed oath "to an English king." The argument occasionally took a comic turn. For example, a pro-Treaty deputy, pleading passionately for the Anglo-Irish settlement in the Dail in January, 1922, argued that when a man married a woman, he swore fidelity rather than allegiance to her. An opposition deputy snapped, "wait till you get married." No one is reported as laughing.
In the North, in the beginning was the unionist community. Idealists in 1912 wrote declarations of fidelity to king and country in their own blood. Many went on to die heroically in the trenches on the western front, often with their southern comrades of the Leinster, Munster, Connachtand Dublin regiments. Afterwards, they found themselves besieged by traitorous Sinn Feiners and, eventually, given a six-county province to call their own, as they thought.
The short conflict in the South and the long-term conflict in the North was in part generated by an often passionate and quasireligious refusal to accept politics as a means of engineering peace among peoples with apparently irreconcilable aspirations and purposes. Michael Collins in the South pleaded vainly for just such a view of political life, but was shouted down by his erstwhile comrades. He insisted that the Treaty brought the "freedom to achieve freedom," even if it did not deliver the full thing itself. For his pains, he was killed by his old comrades-in-arms at Beal na Blath.
In the North, the politics of siege prevailed over wiser counsel, and the Ulster unionist sense of being an embattled minority on the island of Ireland overwhelmingly triumphed. The image of the island as being dominated by aggressive, rural, Catholic nationalists of a somehow backward character dominated the collective imagination of many unionists. A.T.Q. Stewart's marvellous image of the South as seen from the North pertains: Landscape with Bandits, a chapter heading in his fascinating study of unionist psychology, The Narrow Ground.
Both parts of Ireland were crippled politically and, perhaps, spiritually, by the terrible events of 1912 to 1923. Both unionism and nationalism were damaged by these events; unionism lost the generous and creative strand represented by, for example, the builders of Victorian Dublin or Horace Plunkett and his rural co-operatives; the nationalists lost the generous vision of political leaders like Michael Collins, James Connolly or Erskine Childers and cultural leaders like Patrick Pearse or Thomas MacDonagh.
It may be that it is only now, three generations later, that the peoples of the island are coming round to the proposition that politics rather than force can actually settle, if not resolve, their differences. Both parts of the island have played self-defeating versions of the political game since the Treaty of 1921. In effect, they have been playing, often knowingly and with great acumen, considerable irresponsibility and lack of scruple, zero-sum games in public life. The disaster of 1920 to 1923 led to an upsurge in the value of a cunning, manipulative and parochial political style in both parts of Ireland.
Both parts of Ireland have played self-defeating versions of the political game since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and its subsequent ratification in January, 1922. Connolly's famously prophesied "carnival of reaction" indeed came about. Each set of political leaders sought a local majority and used a rhetoric of antagonism to organise its local majority against a real or imagined collective enemy on the other side of a psychic and even international frontier. In a strange way, each set of leaders needed the other to stay in power.
The Belfast Agreement aspires to break Ireland out of this historical and structural trap. It seems to be informed by a version of what is sometimes called the theory of games. Political scientists sometimes think of political life as a kind of game, a contest played according to a set of rules or constitutional system, broadly defined. There are many fascinating games one can play in games theory; one marvellous one, for example, is prisoner's dilemma, where two prisoners will get out of prison earlier if each trusts the other enough not to squeal to the jailer in the hope of a lighter sentence at the other's expense.
A commonplace distinction in the theory of games is that between zero-sum and non zero-sum games. I would argue that the Irish, North and South, have tended to give themselves zero-sum political games to play ever since 1912. A zero-sum game is one which has as its basic rule "I win, you lose; you win, I lose." A good example of such a game would be the game of chess, where the defeat of one is necessitated by the victory of the other. Soccer football, boxing or draughts are others. Another, perhaps uncomfortably pertinent, example of such a "game" would be a duel to the death, involving "coffee for one, pistols for two," as the 19th century joke had it.
Non zero-sum games force the players to co-operate, much as in prisoner's dilemma. In such games I may do better than you do, but both can do tolerably well. My victory does not entail your total defeat and annihilation; in fact you may win also, in the form of a consolation prize. Also, you may fight and run away, and live to fight another day, and such an action may be regarded as not cowardice, but as a common sense move within the rules of the game.
Successful democratic political systems commonly build in non zero-sum devices in the form of, for example, power-sharing committee systems; regular elections where the loser gets another chance at attaining power; federal devices which in effect permit some provinces to be governed by the minority while the nation and the rest of the provinces are governed by the majority. Judicial systems whereby the power-holders are curbed through the enforcement of, for example, a bill of rights, would also be a non zero-sum device. The doctrine of the separation of powers, as enshrined in the Irish Constitution, entails non zero-sum politics, if to a rather limited extent.
The Constitution of the United States, the brainchild of, in particular, James Madison, is choc-a-bloc with such mechanisms, which is one of the reasons why that extraordinary document is the oldest "living" constitutional document in the world. In the US, it is quite possible for the national government to be in the hands of the Democrats, the Senate to be Republican, the House of Representatives to be Democrat, the Supreme Court to be Republican in general ideological persuasion, and for vast swathes of the national territory to be controlled by local versions of each political party. It is also very possible for these constellations of power to shift bewilderingly in a couple of years.
In Ireland we have been over-fond of "winner-takes-all" systems. In what is now the Republic, an intensely majoritarian party system evolved, which imposed a conformist nationalist and moral regime on everybody in the 1920s and 1930s. For a long time a system close to what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of the majority" prevailed. It was much lampooned by satirists like Myles na gCopaleen and denounced by liberals such as Sean O Faolain, but it permitted the persecution of non-conformists right up to the mid-1960s.
Dissidents found their reading tastes, religious beliefs, political opinions and sexual lives policed, regulated and curtailed by fiat of a large and conformist majority. The Constitution of 1937 pretended that the recognition of Northern Ireland included in the Treaty of 1921 was withdrawn, without in reality withdrawing that recognition. Judge Rory O'Hanlon, in a recent article, has rightly pointed this out, to devastating effect. In a sense, de Valera's Constitution attempted to airbrush Ireland's largest minority, the Ulster unionist community, out of existence.
In the North, of course, zero-sum styles of political action were even more extreme, and had even more serious and tragic consequences. The cliched "Protestant state for a Protestant people" was indeed erected, involving the bullying of, and discrimination against, the nationalist minority. It also entailed the whipping into line of nationalist and unionist workers on opposite sides of the sectarian divide. To cap it all, the persecuted minority appealed to a potential all-Ireland tyranny of the majority. The Provo version of this majority was the one that was held to have expressed itself once only in December 1918.
Everybody tried to play zero-sum. Possibly it took an American, George Mitchell, to see that a move to non zero-sum rules was required, and the Belfast Agreement promises to assist in such a move. However, it should be acknowledged that the true begetter of this kind of analysis of the situation is John Hume, who has spoken tirelessly in favour of such a view of political life for an entire generation.
The agreement gives everyone prizes, much like Alice in Wonderland, but in a very non-fantasist and practical way. As Prof Paul Bew has argued, the unionists have, from their own point of view, actually won; the union with Britain is guaranteed, and the principle of consent is to be enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic, thereby reinforcing that guarantee. Oddly, and perhaps appropriately, the traditionally nationalist principle of popular sovereignty is replacing the principle of monarchical sovereignty as the legitimating doctrine of Northern Ireland.
Northern nationalists achieve parity of esteem, a bill of rights and a substantial chunk of political power within a Northern Ireland Assembly. Dublin receives crossBorder links and formal recognition of its legitimate concern with Northern affairs and with matters of common concern which, willy-nilly, united all the inhabitants of this small island. "East-west" Britain-Ireland links are also formally established. Significantly, these byzantine devices have provoked relatively little objection from the public, unlike similar proposals in 1973; to adapt Seamus Mallon's memorable phrase, Sunningdale has, perhaps, been learned.
A more sensitive set of issues involves the future policing of Northern Ireland and the release of paramilitary prisoners, many of whom have been guilty of the most revolting crimes. Understandably, it was these issues that most exercised public opinion on the desirability of the entire package, and it was the release of some prisoners that most nearly shipwrecked the entire deal. However, the endurance and fortitude of the people of Ireland over the last 30 years have defeated the paramilitaries, practitioners of a particularly vicious zero-sum game.
The general philosophy behind the agreement is, then, non zero-sum, and based on a fundamentally correct diagnosis of the Irish disease: a tendency, common to both North and South, to treat politics as a kind of warfare, where enemies are driven from the field, rather than treating your political opponents as people with whom you indeed contend, but also as people with whom you must co-operate, if only to have a tolerable existence. A general wish that this agreement be made to work and a desperate yearning for peace in Ireland is also working for it.
There is an old Sligo children's joke: "birds in their little nests agree, for if they didn't, they would all fall out." Wisdom out of the mouths of innocents.
Tom Garvin is Professor of Politics in University College, Dublin. His books include 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy.