The negotiation of the Belfast Agreement was nothing short of a miracle. Yet somehow, during the past year, and despite great attention to detail - especially as far as Downing Street's role in the marching season went - neither the British nor the Irish government has quite fully internalised that fact.
The Blairists - so used to success elsewhere - have behaved rather like a beautiful girl who quite naturally, as is her due, received a ticket to the ball which did not have to be paid for.
The Irish Government, on the other hand, self-confidence massively boosted by the continued success of the Celtic Tiger, has never really built on that self-confidence to make an analysis of the state of play within Northern unionism free from those older, more cramped ideologies rooted in the days when the mainstream nationalism of the Irish State was, in part, an ideology of compensation for relative material failure.
The two governments bear a share of responsibility for the current crisis of the peace process. They went for a quick fix last July which the local political marketplace simply could not sustain.
In the wake of the understandable row over Dr Mowlam's refusal to sanction the IRA in the wake of the Florida gun-running and the murder of Charles Bennett, the basic elements of intergovernmental strategy should be recalled, for the objective is to achieve settlement based above all on the inclusion of the extremists, the men of violence.
The governments believe that thus far they have saved hundreds of lives and are within an ace of tempting the republican movement into the lobster pot - to use a metaphor much used by officials - of safe, non-violent politics if only unionism would allow the setting up of an inclusive government in Northern Ireland as proposed under the agreement.
The generation now in office in London believes not only that heavy repressive measures like internment would not work against the IRA but that any repressive measure is inherently fatally counterproductive - much better to co-opt the enemy. That is why prisoner releases have continued - in explicit defiance of a key section of the agreement.
As a young student in Cambridge in 1972, I remember well the protest demonstration which followed the tragic events of Bloody Sunday in Derry. I recall the personalities on that demonstration - they included people who are now key figures in New Labour as ministers and colleagues.
The ethos of any political generation generally has its blind spots. Few of these people have a serious understanding of Ireland, but it is a political fact of importance, and it cannot be lightly ignored by the Ulster Unionists, who have this week been disturbed by reports of the Patten Commission proposals on policing.
Throughout the year, Mr Patten has behaved as if he felt he had to please four main constituencies: Mr Trimble's pro-agreement unionist supporters; Mr John Hume's supporters in non-violent nationalism; the senior command of the RUC around Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the chief constable; Mr Adams and his followers in Sinn Fein and the IRA.
To please such incompatible groupings was always going to be difficult. If the leaked version of the report in the Belfast Telegraph is substantially accurate, Mr Patten will have satisfied John Hume's people above all; then Mr Gerry Adams; with the senior staff of the RUC less satisfied; while the pro-agreement Ulster Unionist constituency of Mr Trimble - already under increasingly effective siege from a resurgent hardline Protestant politics - will be infuriated.
The change to the name and symbols of the force will be seen as an insult to the 300 police men and women who died in the fight against both republican and loyalist terrorism. The localisation of the security structures as an open door to IRA influence and a Mafia state is an increasingly strong theme in public debate.
However, there is another way of looking at Mr Patten's apparently radical report. It removes the last remaining excuse for the maintenance of the IRA - every perceived grievance of nationalism will have been met or be in the process of being met.
There will not, it is true, be a united Ireland until a majority in the North vote for that - but that is what the people of Ireland voted for massively in the 1998 referendum. The British state in Ireland has thus been legitimised by the people of Ireland. In certain conceivable circumstances, radical IRA decommissioning could have been fudged; after Patten that is an impossibility.
Mr Blair simply has to deliver on his promise on the morning of the referendum in the Irish News: "Representatives of parties intimately linked to paramilitary groups can only be in a future Northern Ireland if it is clear that there will be no more violence and the threat of violence has gone. That doesn't just mean decommissioning, but all bombings, killings, beatings, and an end to targeting, recruiting and all the structures of terrorism."
After the IRA murder of Charles Bennett, and the Florida gunrunning, we are light years from that scenario, but as the Prime Minister said in the same article, there can be no fudge between democracy and terror. Earlier rather than later in the upcoming crisis, Mr Blair has to make a sober pitch to the unionist political class, allow it to mature in the public consciousness, and hope for the best.
In an interesting analysis of Irish politics in 1842, the Earl of Shrewsbury insisted that it was "fair to calculate . . . that they who survive a long political struggle, may come out of it very different from what they were when they went in. They may have lost in prejudice and may have gained in experience."
He went on to insist that no serious politician could turn away from "the noble charge now entrusted . . . of regenerating a whole people". In the 1840s these words fell on deaf ears with catastrophic consequences, but we have to hope as we enter this September that somehow this time the party leaders will find a way through.
Let us consider the consequences of failure to implement the agreement. The shrivelling of the Alliance Party means that (outside the rarefied world of the PUP) nothing exists in the broad non-nationalist community to the left of David Trimble.
Mr Trimble has established a moral stature that was frankly inconceivable in the earlier years of his career. A British government which loses him will have to cope with the destabilising effects on Protestant politics for years.
Meanwhile, the SDLP will be destroyed by Sinn Fein as nationalist politics becomes increasingly embittered. Mr Adams will have no need or capacity to employ those more modernising or non-sectarian impulses which he sometimes appears to have.
These are the dangers - not some awful Plan B which the British government does not really appear to have in its back pocket. These dangers are dreadful enough to give us all food for thought.
Paul Bew is Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College 1999-2000
