Another Step Toward Peace, Another Obstacle

Since the Northern Irish peace process ostensibly began in August 1994, the attempt to find a political solution to Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” has rolled from one crisis to another. Then, last week, an executive cabinet that includes Sinn Fein and a power-sharing government were established for the first time in Northern Ireland’s history. But in a decision that again threatens the delicate process, David Trimble, Ulster Unionist Party leader and first minister of the new government, set an unexpected deadline. He has made his party’s acquiescence to a Sinn Fein role in the government contingent upon the Irish Republican Army giving up some of its weapons by February. Trimble says that he is testing the IRA’s commitment to disarming. The IRA sees Trimble’s demand as a new and unacceptable “precondition.” As a result, some analysts are predicating that the new government may fall even before the honeymoon is over.

Dire warnings of imminent collapse and a return to war have marked each critical stage in the peace process. After the 1994 IRA cease-fire, the British government hesitated to launch inclusive talks because the IRA message on the suspension of military operations didn’t use the word “permanent.” All-party peace talks were eventually set up, with former Sen. George J. Mitchell as chairman. But the talking almost never began. This time, the issue was whether arms decommissioning would be required before or in tandem with the negotiations. Then after almost two years of negotiations, the Good Friday Agreement nearly crashed over prisoner releases and a timetable for surrendering arms. Now comes Trimble.

Some commentators have contended that persistence, Mitchell’s patience and even blind luck have moved the peace process along. But political will and luck can only take you so far. Instead, a deeper historical, demographic and political logic has sustained the momentum toward peace.

In his first address as Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams told a party conference in 1983 that armed struggle was “a morally correct form of resistance” against the British government’s presence in the six counties of Northern Ireland. By the late 1980s, Adams and other Sinn Fein leaders had begun to rethink this strategy. A number of dynamics influenced that shift.

After years of carnage inflicted upon both communities, Adams and elements within the leadership of the IRA concluded that no military solution was viable. Terrible damage could be visited upon the British Army, security forces and on targets in England, but the war could not be won. Additionally, when the Berlin Wall collapsed in late 1989, it became clear to Adams that the ideological and political world was changing.

Certain elements in the British political establishment had considered the Northern Irish republican movement as Marxist-oriented and a potential “back door” for the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War scuttled this analysis and created political openings.

In 1988, Adams began a series of discussions with Social Democratic and Labor Party leader John Hume, an advocate of peaceful change, to find a political way forward. Initially, the dialogue between the two men was repudiated in media and political circles. But there were some in the British and Irish governments who saw logic in Hume’s attempt to go beyond the failed coalitions of moderate nationalists and unionists. Hume’s politics of “inclusion of the extremes” paid off: His discussions with Adams continued into the 1990s and built a key intellectual and political foundation for the future peace negotiations.

Adams also discovered that voters preferred Sinn Fein politics to IRA war. Since embracing democracy and repudiating violence, Sinn Fein has increased its popularity in Northern Ireland and made political inroads in the Irish Republic. There is historical precedent for this in Ireland. Fianna Fail, the party of Eamon de Valera, who dominated Irish Republic politics from the 1930s through the 1960s, won power democratically only after being defeated in a civil war and repudiating further violence.

Also during the ‘80s, the British government, while retaining its commitment to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom, made moves to accommodate constitutional nationalism of the Hume variety in an attempt to isolate Sinn Fein politically. It was also facing the increasingly grim prospect of a protracted IRA war carried out in England.

In 1984, an IRA bomb almost wiped out the entire British Cabinet, which had gathered at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton. The Anglo-Irish Agreement that followed a year later gave the Republic of Ireland a formal consultative role in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. It was negotiated “over the heads” of unionists, which stoked their already significant fears that the British, even under Margaret Thatcher’s Tory leadership, were ready to abandon them to extricate themselves from a political nightmare.

Furthermore, it was the Conservative British government of Edward Heath that shut down the unionist-dominated Northern Irish parliament in 1972 when the prime minister and the unionist leader, Brian Faulkner, could not resolve security issues. Trimble, who has as good a historical memory as any nationalist, may have had these episodes in mind when he pushed his party into the 1997 peace talks, lest the issues be negotiated “for them” if they stayed out.

The demographics of Northern Irish politics have also shifted. During last week’s meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council, which gave Trimble a slim mandate to join the government that included Sinn Fein, one delegate was overheard commenting that “60% of the land mass of Northern Ireland is now controlled by nationalists. Any deal is going to reflect that reality.” The man’s comments underscore the slow but steady shift in the population and political strength of the Catholic nationalist community. Trimble, who leads a party that has been divided and demoralized since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, understands the demographic trajectory. More and more young people with unionist backgrounds have been leaving Northern Ireland for education and business opportunities in Britain.

Meanwhile, Trimble has barely survived a number of crucial votes that would have finished the political career of a unionist leader a decade ago. Sophisticated party activists and unionist voters recognize that the Good Friday Agreement restores some executive power to unionism in the midterm, since local power has become more dispersed. It won’t be long until there is a nationalist political majority in Belfast, a historical bastion of unionism. Furthermore, the accord satisfies one of unionism’s key demands: that there be no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without the democratic consent of the people.

There is also an economic dimension to the peace puzzle. The economic train of the European Union has left the station, and Ireland and Britain are being pulled along. The realignment in Europe has encouraged new thinking about the limits of the nation-state and suggested possibilities for the new North-South bodies that are part of the Good Friday Agreement. Under this agreement, the North/South Ministerial Council is required to consider implementation of EU policies and programs. The Republic of Ireland has had dramatically higher levels of economic growth and productivity than Northern Ireland in recent years, and, increasingly, unionist-oriented business people have recognized the benefit of cross-border linkages.

Internationally, Hume, Adams and even Trimble have shrewdly cultivated “external arbiters” to bring pressure to bear on the evolving political developments. President Bill Clinton has visited Ireland twice during his presidency and has been the only sitting president to visit Northern Ireland. U.S. prominence and pressure made compromise possible at critical times over the past five years.

In many ways, Northern Irish history is congealed in the elaborately structured political apparatus of the new Northern Ireland government. Decades of fear, mistrust and abuse are visible in its complicated parallel-consent procedures, weighted majorities and rules for resolving differences. It makes the famous U.S. system of checks and balances look like anarchy.

There are dangers ahead. In two months, there will be renewed focus on Trimble’s February “deadline.” There remain paramilitary groups still unreconciled to the new reality. The whole structure may indeed come tumbling down in February. But the deeper historical, political and economic logic points in another direction: to a new history as Northern Ireland reinvents itself.*