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Consociational Theory, Northern Ireland's Conflict, and its Agreement. Part 1: What Consociationalists Can Learn from Northern Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

John McGarry  and
Brendan O'Leary
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Abstract

In the first of two articles the authors show what consociational theory may learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, the importance of external agencies in making and implementing consociational settlements, the relations between consociational and self-determination settlements, the ‘complexity’ of internal settlements, the merits of STV (PR) in electoral arrangements, innovations in using proportional representation decision rules to allocate ministerial portfolios, and conceptual modifications. A second article addresses what anti-consociationalists may learn from the same case.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , 2006 , pp. 43 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2006

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References

2 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, ‘Preface’, in Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (eds), The Spirit of the Laws, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989 (first publication, 1748), p. xliii.Google Scholar

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4 See O'Leary, Brendan, ‘Consociation: Refining the Theory and a Defence’, International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, 3 (2003), pp. 693–755,Google Scholarand ‘Debating Consociation: Normative and Explanatory Arguments’, in Sid Noel (ed.), From Power-Sharing to Democracy: Post-Conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies, Toronto, McGill-Queens University Press, 2005, pp. 3–43.

5 Refinements in the definitional and normative accounts of consociation are argued in O’Leary, ‘Consociation: Refining the Theory and a Defence’, ‘Debating Consociation: Normative and Explanatory Arguments’, and ‘Foreword: The Realism of Power-Sharing’, in Michael Kerr, Imposing Power-Sharing: Conflict and Coexistence in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2005.Google Scholar

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7 Lijphart, Arend, ‘Review Article: The Northern Ireland Problem; Cases, Theories, and Solutions’, British Journal of Political Science, 5 (1975), pp. 83–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See our writings on Irish politics, particularly O'Leary, Brendan, ‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement: Statecraft or Folly?’, West European Politics, 10: 1 (1987), pp. 11–12,CrossRefGoogle Scholar28–9; John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, pp. 311–53 and Brendan O’Leary and John McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland, London, Athlone, 1993, pp. 220–326. A complete list of these writings can be found at the end of John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Arrangements, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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16 For a detailed description of this consociational architecture see O'Leary, Brendan, ‘The Nature of the Agreement’, Fordham Journal of International Law, 22: 4 (1999), pp. 1626–67.Google ScholarThe Agreement has all four of consociation's organizational principles. Community autonomy is least strongly represented in the text, but tacitly evident in the maintenance of separate but proportionally funded primary and secondary education.

17 Donald Horowitz suggests that ‘European conflicts are less ascriptive in character, less severe in intensity, less exclusive in their command of the loyalty of participants, and less pre-emptive of other forms of conflict’ by comparison with African and Asian conflicts. See his Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985, p. 572. He must either regard Northern Ireland as typical of moderately divided European societies to save his hypothesis that consociation is unattainable in deeply divided societies, or accept that his thesis is refuted.Google Scholar

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19 Endogenous factors were also important, particularly demographic change. The Protestant share of Northern Ireland's population is in decline, and sits currently around 55 per cent. There is a possibility, and an even stronger perception, that there will be a Catholic majority at some point in the foreseeable future, see, e.g. O'Leary, Brendan, ‘More Green, Fewer Orange’, Fortnight, 281 and 282 (1990), pp. 12–15.Google Scholarand 16–17; Brendan O’Leary, ‘Unionists Will Lose Electoral Dominance’, Irish Times, 2 July 1997. This shift has undercut unionists’ enthusiasm for majoritarian democracy and increased their strategic interest in power-sharing.

20 O'Leary, Brendan, ‘The Conservative Stewardship of Northern Ireland 1979–97: Sound-Bottomed Contradictions or Slow Learning’, Political Studies, 45: 4 (1997), pp. 663–76;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBrendan O’Leary, ‘The Labour Government and Northern Ireland 1974–9’, in McGarry and O’Leary, The Northern Ireland Conflict, pp. 194–216.

21 O’Leary, ‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement: Statecraft or Folly?’.Google Scholar

22 Indeed, the option of integration, which had been abandoned since 1979, was re-considered during the Major years. See O’Leary, ‘The Conservative Stewardship of Northern Ireland 1979–97’.Google Scholar

23 Brendan O’Leary, ‘The Belfast Agreement and the Labour Government: How to Handle and Mishandle History's Hand’, in Anthony Seldon (ed.), The Blair Effect: The Blair Government 1997–2001, London, Little, Brown & Company, 2001, pp. 448– 88.Google Scholar

24 Arthur, Paul, ‘Diasporan Intervention in International Affairs: Irish America as a Case Study’, Diaspora, 1: 2 (1991), pp. 143–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPaul Arthur, Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland and the Northern Ireland Problem, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2000; Michael Cox, ‘Bringing in the “International”: The IRA Ceasefire and the End of the Cold War’, International Affairs, 73: 4 (1997), pp. 671–93; Adrian Guelke, ‘The United States, Irish Americans and the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, International Affairs, 72: 3 (1996), pp. 521–36.

25 Conor O’Clery, The Greening of the White House: The Inside Story of How America Tried to Bring Peace to Ireland, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1997 (1996).Google Scholar

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28 TUAS was reputedly an acronym for either Totally Unarmed Strategy or Tactical Use of Armed Struggle, but its exact meaning was never spelled out. One journalist, who believes in the Machiavellian qualities of the Sinn Féin leadership, argues that it told the SDLP and the Irish government that it meant the former, and republican activists that it meant the latter. See Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, London, Penguin, 2002, p. 423. Loyalists and unionists, and those who believed that republicans could spell, thought it meant the latter, particularly after the IRA broke its ceasefire in 1996. American supporters of Sinn Féin thought it meant the former. One website we came across lists it as neither: apparently the true meaning was ‘tactical use of absolute stupidity’.Google Scholar

29 MacGinty, Roger, ‘American Influence on the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, Journal of Conflict Studies, (Fall 1997), p. 34.Google Scholar

30 The complaints of the State Department were spearheaded by the US ambassador to the UK, Raymond Seitz, who complained bitterly at the overturning of his counsel at the time, and in his memoirs. See Raymond Seitz, Over Here, London, Trafalgar Square, 1998. More extensive analyses of the exogenous factors that led to the Good Friday Agreement are available. See, e.g. John McGarry, ‘Globalization, European Integration and the Northern Ireland Conflict’, in Michael Keating and John McGarry (eds), Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 295–324; Adrian Guelke, ‘International Dimensions of the Belfast Agreement’, in Rick Wilford (ed.), Aspects of the Belfast Agreement, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 245–63; McGarry and O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, ch. 10; Brendan O’Leary, ‘The Belfast Agreement and the British–Irish Agreement: Consociation, Confederal Institutions, a Federacy, and a Peace Process’, in Andrew Reynolds (ed.), The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management and Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 293–356.Google Scholar

31 Personal communication from Professor Andrew Wilson, who interviewed Trimble on this matter. See Wilson, Andrew, ‘From Beltway to Belfast: The Clinton Administration, Sinn Féin, and the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, New Hibernia Review, 1: 3 (1997), pp. 23–39;Google ScholarOne of us attended two St Patrick's Day celebrations held at the White House (in 1994 and 1998) and the White House May 1995 Investment for Peace conference, and can testify to the care taken to ensure balanced invitations of unionists, nationalists, republicans, loyalists and others.

32 The exceptions to this rule were analyses of the Lebanon – the arrangements for which were known to be crucially affected by regional politics. The destabilization of Lebanon's consociation in the 1970s powerfully shows the possible impact of malign external interventions. See Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation, London, I.B. Tauris, 1993.Google Scholar

33 We do not think that exogenous forces can promote stable consociational settlements when endogenous forces are strongly unfavourable, but we do not subscribe to the view that outsiders can make no appreciable difference. Michael's Kerr's PhD, now published as Imposing Power-Sharing: Conflict and Coexistence in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2005, maintains outside intervention has been decisive in the two cases he explores in depth.Google Scholar

34 Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies.Google Scholar

35 Lijphart, ‘Review Article: The Northern Ireland Problem’, p. 105; O’Leary, ‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement: Statecraft or Folly?’; McGarry, ‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Power-Sharing in Northern Ireland’; McGarry, John, ‘Northern Ireland and the Option of Consociationalism’, Plural Societies, 20 (June 1990), pp. 1–20;Google ScholarJohn McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, ‘Northern Ireland's Options: A Framework, Summary and Analysis’, in John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary (eds), The Future of Northern Ireland, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 268–303.

36 Lijphart, ‘Review Article: The Northern Ireland Problem’, p. 100.Google Scholar

37 Unionist defenders and republican critics of the Agreement correctly point out that this recognition of the right to self-determination is qualified, i.e. it is at odds with the traditional republican view that the right be exercised within a single all-Ireland unit on a majoritarian basis. Nevertheless the recognition of Ireland's self-determination in this qualified manner represented a major concession by the UK government. It is the basis for the argument that the Agreement's institutions rest on a joint Irish act of self-determination rather than the revisable will of the Westminster parliament, and the basis on which nationalists reject the legality of the UK's post-Agreement unilateral statutory enactment and use of suspension powers.Google Scholar

38 O’Leary, ‘The Nature of the Agreement’.Google Scholar

39 McGarry and O’Leary, The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements, ch. 13.Google Scholar

40 O'Leary, Brendan, ‘The Protection of Human Rights under the Belfast Agreement’, Political Quarterly, 72: 3 (2001), pp. 353–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Paul Mitchell, ‘The Party-System and Party Competition’, in Paul Mitchell and Rick Wilford (eds), Politics in Northern Ireland, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1999, pp. 91–116.Google Scholar

42 O'Leary, Brendan and Evans, Geoff, ‘Northern Ireland: La Fin de Siècle, the Twilight of the Second Protestant Ascendancy and Sinn Féin's Second Coming’, Parliamentary Affairs, 50: 4 (1997), pp. 672–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThe nature of executive formation in the Agreement should act as one possible check on the possibilities of fragmentation under party-list PR, because only large parties are likely to win ministries under the d’Hondt allocation process, but that is true of any electoral system combined with this executive.

43 Elklit shows that the system has been in use in Danish local government for many decades, so Northern Ireland is only the pioneer in using this technique to achieve power-sharing among ethnonationally opposed parties. For a technical analysis, see O'Leary, Brendan, Grofman, Bernard and Elklit, Jorgen, ‘Divisor Methods for Sequential Portfolio Allocation in Multi-Party Executive Bodies: Evidence from Northern Ireland and Denmark’, American Journal of Political Science, 18: 1 (2005), pp. 198–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 McGarry and O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, pp. 373–5.Google Scholar

45 We did help in the dissemination of such ideas. See, e.g. John McGarry and Charles Graham, ‘Co-determination’, in McGarry and O’Leary (eds), The Future of Northern Ireland, pp. 168–9; O'Leary, Brendan, ‘Afterword: What is Framed in the Framework Documents?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18: 4 (1995), pp. 864–7;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBrendan O’Leary, Tom Lyne, Jim Marshall, and Bob Rowthorn, Northern Ireland: Sharing Authority, London, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1993, pp. 139–44.

46 McGarry, John and O'Leary, Brendan, ‘Stabilising Northern Ireland's Agreement’, Political Quarterly, 75: 3 (2004), pp. 213–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 O’Leary, ‘Debating Consociation’.Google Scholar

48 For one analysis of the IRA's history and road to disarmament see O'Leary, Brendan, ‘Mission Accomplished? Looking back at the Ira’, Field Day Review, 1 (2005), pp. 217–46.Google Scholar