ABSTRACT
Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century Northern Ireland was aptly termed “a place apart,” due to the apparent persistence of ascriptive identities that, according to conventional wisdom, should have no place in a modernizing, and thereafter globalizing society.1 However, this uncanny “apartness” was so striking because, as with everything uncanny, it returned to the disowned familiar. The place apart was actually deeply embedded in both British and Irish culture and contained within a governmental structure that devolved limited, if significant, powers to the regional Stormont regime. This same place apart was also claimed by the adjoining nation-state, the Republic of Ireland, as integral to its sovereign territory. I mention these well-known features of Northern Ireland at the outset, as I believe they and related features radically qualify any claims regarding the centrality of consociational arrangements to the recent and emergent transformation of politics in Northern Ireland. Instead, they highlight the extent to which the political conflict within Northern Ireland was enmeshed in and subordinate to larger socio-political and politico-cultural forces and they underline that any transformation inevitably had to negotiate these multiple force fields, as they distributed their effects within Northern Ireland’s political cultures. In their informative opening “Argument” John McGarry and Brendan
O’Leary carefully qualify their endorsement of consociationalism as follows: “In short, while consociation was and is vital for a political settlement in Northern Ireland, it had to be supplemented by key binational institutions that squarely addressed the national dimension of the conflict between British nationalists, known as unionists, and Irish integrationists, known as
nationalists. Consociation was a necessary, but insufficient, requirement for a stable agreement.”2 Thereafter, they itemize several features of the Good Friday Agreement that all “departed from traditional consociational accords”; namely the North-South Ministerial Council, the British-Irish Governmental Conference, recognition of the people of Ireland’s right to national self-determination, and recognition of the principle of consent, and the British-Irish Council.3 Subsequently, with reference to the testing endgame, they highlight issues of security and, implicitly, of trust in the new security arrangements regarding policing, decommissioning, and paramilitary organizations, amongst others.4 As they put it: “In Northern Ireland, the rival parties disagreed more strongly on security questions than on the design of the political institutions.”5 Throughout their discussion they recognize the significant, indeed critical, roles played by “external” actors such as the United Kingdom and Irish governments, the United States, and the European Community. Faced with such a long set of significant qualifications, Northern Ireland would appear, then, from the perspective of theories of consociational democracy, very much “a place apart” after all! These several qualifications give rise to two related questions. First, is such
a qualified and restricted form of consociation – an intricate power-sharing government with limited powers over a restricted set of portfolios and subject, finally, to Westminster – well characterized as an instructive example of consociational democracy? Given that Westminster retains authority in key domains such as international relations, defence, the economy, and immigration, to name a few, and given that, despite its international treaties, Westminster can prorogue Stormont and re-establish direct rule, the powers available to a power-sharing government at Stormont are quite limited. Of course they are not negligible powers, but the recent success of the new Assembly is hardly a suitable test case in terms of which to proclaim the virtues of consociational democracy per se. The formal and substantive role now played by the Republic of Ireland points in the same direction. Those deep entanglements with both the UK and Ireland, against which Northern Ireland’s uncanny difference took form, are also the resources through which political change has been guided, supported, and contained – as McGarry and O’Leary readily acknowledge. These considerations go directly to the second, more significant, question.
How does political culture figure in this argument about the suitability and likely success of internal political arrangements? In particular, what follows for McGarry and O’Leary’s strong claim regarding consociational democracy, if there is a complex internal connection between any success of governmental structures and the predominant political culture? In turn, what if
the prevalent features of this political culture at any moment are determined not only by internal (intra-Northern Ireland) processes, but also, and interactively, by the dynamic relation between such internal processes and those emanating from the authoritatively privileged, often deeply cathected external sources of (competing, often conflicting) national identities? I will go on to argue that the success of the new political arrangements for
Northern Ireland is dependent upon the framing and containing political culture within which the variety of initiatives and incentives, that McGarry and O’Leary point to, can take root and slowly flourish. Moreover this now fertile ground has been prepared through the interplay of internal and external processes. Just as “the Troubles” took root on fertile ground prepared by the conflicted co-presence of British and Irish identifications and claims to sovereignty, as so many internally distributed and amplified effects, likewise their displacement has taken root upon the ground of an alternate political culture carefully prepared, and insisted upon, by the two principal sovereign authorities and either welcomed or reluctantly accepted by some internal parties, or fractions thereof. Hence, my argument is that political culture looms as a far more significant variable than McGarry and O’Leary recognize. I am not suggesting that they would reject an argument that political culture is significant, rather that the account they develop fails to systematically incorporate any such recognition. What, however, if it is the very fault lines of political culture that estab-
lished the need for those security-enhancing features that “departed from traditional consociational accords”; such features as the federal and confederal aspects of the Good Friday Agreement, and the parallel need for a trust-inducing, or at least anxiety-reducing, handling of security in the endgame period? Indeed, what if the Assembly, as a consociational device, is not so much a “necessary” component of a successful transition, but rather an efficient component of such, but only under propitious political cultural conditions? What becomes of the consociational designation, dare I say, any consociational triumphalism then?
