The Belfast Agreement has in many ways reinforced divisions between the communities in Northern Ireland - symbolised by 47 so-called 'peace lines', writes Robin Wilson
SINCE THE fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe's ideal has been a continent without dividing lines. The cement for this can only be universal norms: democracy, human rights and the rule of law, as embodied in the 47-member Council of Europe.
A fortnight before the Belfast Agreement was concluded, an international round table took place in the city on an architecture of security and human rights for Europe. To give the delegates a break from their three days of discussion in the Europa Hotel, they were taken on a tour. The Nato representative, Harald Bundgarten, came back shaken. Der Antifaschistische Schutzwall had gone from Berlin yet north and west Belfast were pockmarked with walls.
By 1998, there were more of these internal dividing lines, concentrated in the most disadvantaged working-class communities most damaged by the Troubles, than there were when the violence was at its height.
There are still more now - 46 across Northern Ireland at the last official count, given in a parliamentary answer at Westminster by the UK government a month before it devolved power once again last May.
Shortly after the then prime minister, Tony Blair, took his final bow at Stormont, urging the people of Northern Ireland to "escape the heavy chains of history", it emerged that a 25ft-high chain fence was to become barrier number 47. It was to be erected on land used for the playground of an integrated primary school in north Belfast.
How could this be so, when in 1994 the paramilitaries had declared "peace" and in 1998 the politicians - including those paramilitaries who had morphed into politicians - had heralded the onset of reconciliation? Subsequent researches by the journalist Ed Moloney into the motivations of the former and by the UCD academic Catherine O'Donnell into those of the latter have explained this paradox.
In his 2002 book on the IRA, Moloney revealed how in the late 1980s the leadership of the organisation around Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had concluded that, despite the huge arms shipments obtained from Libya, the "Tet offensive" demanded by members who wanted to step up the military campaign to achieve a united Ireland was not viable (as distinct from wrong).
Their alternative approach to the same goal was to shift the emphasis towards the political, constructing a nationalist alliance with Fianna Fáil under Charles Haughey, the SDLP under John Hume and, later, via Irish-America, the Clinton US presidency. O'Donnell's new book on Fianna Fáil and the "peace process" puts Fianna Fáil, particularly under Albert Reynolds, in the driving seat.
But it equally makes clear that what the party sought was not, as has become the received wisdom, a bipartisan approach with Britain (in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement) to broker an impartial deal on Northern Ireland but the advancement of the conventional nationalist goal - although in the run-up to the Belfast Agreement, Bertie Ahern adopted as Taoiseach a more pragmatic position.
By then, however, a polarising dynamic had been set in train. This has culminated in the "peace walls" and the bitter sectarian triumphalism which characterised the contribution by Peter Robinson, prospective Democratic Unionist Party leader and first minister, to this series of articles (Monday, April 7th).
Indeed. when in the first public manifestation of the "peace process", the "Hume-Adams initiative" was revealed in 1993, it generated such a gulf of uncertainty and fear that the succeeding month was marked by more deaths - notably the Shankill IRA bomb and the Greysteel UDA massacre - than any since 1976.
As in that year, however, the unsung heroes of Northern Ireland - the trade unionists, those working for reconciliation and ordinary concerned citizens - took to the streets in their tens of thousands.
And just as the Peace People had at least ended the egregious inhumanity of the car bomb, what Adams disdained as "the so-called peace movement" brought about within a year an effective end, however imperfect, to the paramilitaries' campaigns of murder. It was thus that the peace Northern Ireland currently enjoys emerged.
Unsurprisingly, the elite architects of the Belfast Agreement, also well represented in this series of articles, place themselves rather than the public at the centre of events. Indeed, persuaded that only the 1998 agreement stood between them and a resumption of large-scale paramilitary violence, Blair and Ahern repeatedly warned of the dark consequences of the "political vacuum" they associated with suspension of the post-agreement institutions. On the contrary, the number of shootings and bombings rose in the years before the collapse of the institutions in 2002, only to fall back under renewed direct rule.
The agreement could have made more difference. Unlike in 1974, when the devolved arrangements were the result of public debate and so did conform to a greater degree to universally defensible norms - there was no orange-and-green designation then, for example, of Assembly members - it was a product of negotiation with parties committed to communalist agendas.
As a consolidation of the sectarian political stand-off amid the cooling embers of ethnic violence, the agreement was thus studded with mutual communal vetoes which continually brought it to nought. Northern Ireland has actually only enjoyed powersharing government for some 40 months over the last decade, one third of the period. Inspired by the non-sectarian elements in the North's political culture, however, the agreement did contain subordinate aspects based on universal norms.
These provisions, for integrated education and mixed housing, human and minority rights and attending to victims of the "Troubles", could have been the basis for a Northern Ireland without dividing lines. Yet, as Blair and Ahern became ever more anxious to secure their political legacy, they were party at St Andrews in 2006 to a realpolitik deal with the DUP and SF, which filleted the agreement of its more attractive parts and added further deadlocking vetoes, to get the institutions "up and running".
The Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein has demonstrated that what ethnically divided societies lack is impartial public authority, essential if trust among fellow citizens is not to dissolve into hostility between rival "communities".
Until and unless Northern Ireland has constitutional arrangements which align more closely with universal norms, and political leaders who value them, it will remain an outpost of Europe where ever more dividing lines are under construction.
Robin Wilson is completing a PhD at Queen's University Belfast on the travails of power-sharing in Northern Ireland. With his supervisor, Prof Rick Wilford, he has been leading a research team since 1999 monitoring the working of devolution in the region (outputs available at www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/research/devolution/devo-monitoring-programme.html ).