Tim White has assembled an impressive array of contributions to this rigorous and readable volume, topped and tailed by his own opening and concluding assessments. The volume begins with an optimistic foreword from Martin Mansergh, claiming that the Good Friday Agreement ‘has done more than establish peace in Northern Ireland. It has also closed the final chapter in the conflict between Britain and Ireland’ (p. vii). Given that the 1970–97 phase of violence was not inter-state and that more than 150 deaths from political violence have occurred since the Agreement, including Northern Ireland’s worst atrocity, a quizzical eyebrow might be raised at both such claims.
However, it would be churlish to deny the significance of the 1998 deal and White picks out the salient lessons for other peace processes. These include how different actors learned different lessons; inclusivity and intense engagement in negotiations and settlement; few preconditions; tackling security issues; the prudent use of third parties; economic aid; the amelioration of adverse structural conditions; support for moderates and marginalisation of spoilers; and the promotion of reconciliation in civil society.
Northern Ireland’s peace process achieved some, but not all, of the above. Inclusivity was largely apparent and there was much learning undertaken by all participating parties. Preconditions were rare, although one side had to remove its (admittedly un-exercisable) constitutional claim and received modest reward for so doing. Armed groups had to withdraw and the key thing missing from the checklist is that political opportunity structures must be available to former ‘combatants’ – as was the case, more particularly on the republican side.
Reconciliation has not been achieved, although the management of difference has been more successful. As an astute chapter from William Hazleton makes clear, post-Agreement sectarian disputes have ‘dampened enthusiasm for transferring the Irish model to other parts of the world’ (p. 55). Rightly, the chapter offered by White, Owsiak and Clarke highlights the often positive roles played by former prisoners in discouraging others from following their path, yet a series of piecemeal projects is not enough, as ‘conflict resolution will not be achieved without an improved associational life’ based upon greater integration (p. 256).
Mary-Alice Clancy offers a sure-footed and realistic analysis of the strengths and limitations of international involvement in the peace process in her chapter on third-party intervention. She highlights the mix of incentives and sanctions provided by the United States in its brokerage role, although there was clearly asymmetry here which might have been teased out more. Sinn Féin needed U.S. dollars and international prestige more than did the U.U.P. or the D.U.P. and the carrots and sticks were directed much more at republicans. Correctly, Clancy demonstrates the limits of exportability of the Northern Irish peace process, located amid disinterest, not territorial volatility, in the Irish Republic and based in a far more stable geopolitical arena than most other peace processes.
Indeed the only questionable part of Clancy’s chapter is where she asserts that ‘we do know, however, that by 1994, 80 per cent of operations planned by the I.R.A.’s Belfast Brigade were being foiled by the police’ (p.187). We cannot know such a precise fact, yet it appears to have been elevated across different books into an authoritative percentage. Paul Dixon’s typically pugnacious chapter does deal with the ‘victory and defeat of the I.R.A.’. Never one to pull his intellectual punches, Dixon criticises what he labels as ‘incompatible strands of neo-conservatism’, attacking the work of Bew and Frampton, which he claims, demonstrates ‘confusion over whether the I.R.A won, lost, or drew the war’ (p.132). His own view is that ‘there is little evidence that the I.R.A. was defeated by the early nineties’ (p.134) and cautions against mechanistic approaches to whether or not to engage in dialogue with armed groups, arguing for case-by-case pragmatic realism.
Ultimately, as Tim White concludes with some shrewd final observations, the ambiguities of the peace deal are the most valuable lesson for export. If both sides to a conflict can at least maintain to their supporters that constitutional progress towards ambitions is being made, then a deal is sellable. Ultimately, this ambiguity is of course nonsense: republicans are barely nearer a united Ireland than pre-1998, although there was no obvious alternative to the building of all-island political strength. The maintenance of rival constitutional ambitions means that inter-communal conflict remains, but in a context in which differing ambitions do not prevent at least some concentration on what can be achieved within the existing polity in the short-term. It’s progress, of the very modest variety.
