THE BELFAST AGREEMENT 10 YEARS ON: Can the Northern peace process really be used as a blueprint for settling political conflicts around the world? asks Paul Gillespie
SOUTH AFRICA, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, the Basque Country, Corsica, Kosovo, Bosnia- Herzegovina, Kashmir, Afghanistan, East Timor, South Tyrol, Lebanon. These are but some of the political conflicts around the world canvassed as comparable to or capable of drawing lessons from the Belfast Agreement. Ireland suddenly has a new export industry in the modelling and mediation of such conflicts. Such a branding reinforces its international image of successful development. But can the agreement really carry the weight of such comparisons? Is it a genuine model for other political settlements?
The answers to these questions turn as much on how the Northern Ireland conflict is defined as on the methods used to resolve it in the agreement.
Seeing it essentially as an internal war against terrorist irredentism immediately limits the comparative focus. So does an understanding based on the need for internal powersharing between majority and minority communities. If competing state sovereignty is at stake, yet another perspective is involved, since an international dimension must be present to make the model relevant. And then there is the view that a rooted conflict of ethnic and political identities like this requires mechanisms to emancipate the individuals and communities trapped in it if it is to be truly resolved. In that case, the agreement is often criticised for reproducing the conflict rather than transforming it.
Political practitioners confronted with these differences understandably emphasise the difficulties of putting other conflicts too much in the mould of Northern Ireland's. Particularities rule and one should be hesitant to draw spurious parallels. Thus Tony Blair resists too close an analogy with the Israel-Palestine issue on which he is currently engaged, or with Iraq, where powersharing is also a central question. Former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, who oversaw IRA decommissioning, underlined in Dublin this week the limited or non-existent extent of genuine negotiation on Kosovo with the Serbian government and Serbian minority, compared to the elongated British-Irish and internal process on Northern Ireland's settlement.
Blair allows that political will and commitment can make a decisive difference when extended over as long a period as his 10-year involvement in the North. And that is a valid lesson for leaders charged with finding ways to reconcile intractable disputes. So many of them were regarded as frozen, like the North's, to justify neglect. It takes courage and insight to understand how changing circumstances can render them more soluble and therefore capable of having lessons drawn from elsewhere - or resisted as the case may be.
The Belfast Agreement combines international and internal elements. It is a treaty between two sovereign states providing for institutionalised co-operation and a possible change in territorial self-government by mutual consent. It sets out an agreement between eight political parties to share power proportionately in a devolved executive within the United Kingdom, with certain safeguards and veto rights. It entrenches universal rights and values of recognition and respect. And it specifies agreements and timetables on decommissioning arms, policing and other issues on which powersharing would depend.
This distinctive combination of external and internal elements adds complexity to the modelling and gives it a definite pluralist appeal. Compared to the Kosovo agreement, for example, it does not transfer sovereignty but provides a mechanism to do so by longer-term consent rather than recognising the outcome of a war for independence.
In fact, independence is less an option in Northern Ireland than unification with the Republic. These distinctions between devolved, independent and transferred sovereignty constrain exact parallels between the North and the Basque Country, Corsica, Kashmir or Sri Lanka even if they do not invalidate comparisons or political learning between them.
Compared to Israel-Palestine, there is a qualitatively different commitment to internal powersharing in Northern Ireland rather than a partition which, in the words of Israeli researcher Guy Ben-Porat, who has compared the two, "leans towards a zero-sum dynamic that undermines co-operation and limits the transformation of the conflict". He argues that among the lessons to be drawn from the Belfast Agreement are the need for "multiple citizenships and shared sovereignty, where partition is impossible and, on the other hand, institutions that foster civic co-operation and the interaction of Israelis and Palestinians as equals".
He also sees a much more benign relationship between globalisation and European regional integration in Ireland than of any similar processes in the Middle East.
Adrian Guelke of Queen's University has examined international political comparisons with the North. He points out that, after initially being attracted to the Palestinian analogy in the 1990s during the Oslo peace process, Sinn Féin shifted its focus more to South Africa after Oslo collapsed because of the much weaker position of the Palestinians compared to the black majority there. It helped too that the African National Congress was so interested in reciprocating this sympathy - as was the white National Party.
The actual outcome of the two sets of negotiations was, however, full of irony. Thus while the National Party in South Africa looked to Northern Ireland to get a consociational (or powersharing) outcome, "what it in fact got, after a brief transitionary period, was majority rule. By contrast, the republican movement in Ireland looked to South Africa to get an anti-colonial outcome and what it got was the consociational settlement" of the Belfast Agreement - albeit with the possibility of Irish unity to come. Such are the attractions and perils of political comparison.
Reference to "consociationalism" raises another central feature of the Belfast Agreement.
This is the term used by political scientists to describe political accommodations in a deeply divided society based on four principal elements: executive powersharing by parties representing each of its main communities; autonomy or self-government in cultural matters; proportional representation in key public institutions and with a similar distribution of public resources and expenditures; and veto rights on changes affecting their vital interests.
The term was coined by Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart in the 1970s to analyse the experience of the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, four European democracies marked by the following characteristics: no majority segment; multiparty systems; small population size; appropriately structured cleavages; overarching loyalties; representative party systems; geographical concentration of segments; and traditions of elite accommodation. In a well-known paper in 1975, he applied the consociational model to Northern Ireland; it has been the intellectual underpinning of powersharing solutions since then (even though in practice it was formulated before that in the 1973-1974 Sunningdale Agreement).
Two influential academic analysts of Northern Ireland who espouse a consociational approach, Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry, acknowledge their indebtedness to Lijphart but insist it must be applied in an inter-state as well as a domestic setting of Northern Ireland. This, they argue, is what makes the Belfast Agreement original, if not unique. They also distinguish corporate models in which ethnic or community identities are much more closely defined than in the North, where a more liberal version means parties are not obliged to share power and individuals may vote for any one of them.
O'Leary and McGarry usefully identify several strands of criticism made of the Belfast Agreement in a lively discussion among their fellow researchers and scholars, which echo wider political concerns about whether it will perpetuate divisions or create the conditions for them to be reconciled.
Civic republicans believe the British presence creates the divisions and its withdrawal would heal them in the 32-county republic. Civic unionists argue rather that most Catholics would be happy to remain in the UK provided their rights and culture are guaranteed there. Post-national transformers want to see the North changed from the bottom up by cross-community movements against social inequality and sectarian division. And electoral integrationists want to see social integration encouraged by a more voluntary powersharing arrangement and a more cross-party voting system.
The main division, both analytically and politically, is between those who say the agreement will enable joint government and gradually encourage reconciliation across communities and states which remain very reluctant to do much about it, on the one hand; and those who say this kind of powersharing perpetuates the conditions which originally gave rise to the conflict.
Floating between them is a group of pessimists and optimists. Pessimistic realists don't particularly like the agreement but think it may be the best way to manage the North's intractability. Arthur Aughey of the University of Ulster thinks the German word verschlimmbesserung, for better and worse, best describes it. He recalls the term used by those who ran the Austro-Hungarian empire in the later 19th century to describe the best approach to the endemic ethnic and national conflicts they had to manage: a "policy of simmering" whose main purpose was to prevent them boiling over.
Another analogy he uses is Schopenhauer's account of how porcupines learn to live together without getting so close as to prick one another - keep your distance.
Among the more optimistic voices is that of businessman Sir George Quigley, who chairs the Institute for British-Irish Studies at UCD.
He suggests several criteria to judge the Belfast Agreement in 10 years' time: Can a mandatory executive develop a cohesive governing strategy? How much progress will have been made to escape separatist ghettos and move towards social solidarity? What new trajectory will there be for a 32-county economy? Can the Republic and the North exploit their common regional space in other policy spheres? And will UK devolution evolve sufficiently to allow a trade-off between fiscal autonomy and responsibility in the North so that the executive could align its corporation tax with the Republic's?
These nuances should inform the political and analytical work of those who want to use the Belfast Agreement as a model to tackle conflicts elsewhere in the world.
Paul Gillespie in Foreign Policy Editor ofThe Irish Times .