Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title The international system and the Northern Ireland peace process Authors(s) Guelke, Adrian Publication date 2002 Conference details Paper presented to the IBIS conference Renovation or revolution? new territorial politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom, University College Dublin, 3 April 2002. Series IBIS Working Papers; No. 21 Publisher University College Dublin. Institute for British-Irish Studies Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/2255 Downloaded 2021-09-26T00:19:51Z The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) © Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND PEACE PROCESS Adrian Guelke IBISIBIS working working paper paper no. no. 21 5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND PEACE PROCESS Adrian Guelke Working Papers in British-Irish Studies No. 21, 2002 Institute for British-Irish Studies University College Dublin IBIS working papers No. 21, 2002 © the author, 2002 ISSN 1649-0304 ABSTRACT THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND PEACE PROCESS The paper examines the impact of two major events in the international system on the peace process: the end of the Cold War and the attack on America on 11 Sep- tember 2001. The thesis first advanced by Michael Cox that change in the interna- tional context of the conflict in Northern Ireland was a major influence in pressuris- ing the republican movement to adopt its peace strategy in the early 1990s is ana- lysed. Also examined are reasons why the thesis has proved so contentious and why more generally there remains considerable scepticism as to the capacity of ex- ternal events to shape events in Ireland in any fundamental way. The question of the impact of September 11 is then addressed. Publication information Paper presented to the IBIS conference Renovation or revolution? new territorial politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom, University College Dublin, 3 April 2002. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Adrian Guelke is Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research interests include the politics of deeply divided so- cieties, most particularly the cases of South Africa and Northern Ireland, compari- son of deeply divided societies, political violence, terrorism. Selected publications include: A farewell to arms? From “long war” to long peace in Northern Ireland (co- editor; Manchester University Press, 2000); South Africa in transition: the misun- derstood miracle (I.B. Tauris, 1999); The police, public order and the state (co- author; 2nd ed., Macmillan, 1996); The age of terrorism and the international politi- cal system (I.B. Tauris, 1995); New perspectives on the Northern Ireland conflict (editor; Avebury, 1994); Northern Ireland: the international perspective (Gill and Macmillan, 1988). THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND PEACE PROCESS Adrian Guelke INTRODUCTION In my exploration of the impact of the international political system on the peace process in Northern Ireland, I am going to focus on two events that have been widely seen as significant watersheds in world politics. They are associated with two dates: 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and 11 September 2001, when the United States mainland was attacked by Al Qaeda. The first is linked to the broader process of the end of the Cold War; the second to a commit- ment by the most powerful state in the world to “a war against international terror- ism”. Sufficient time has passed since the end of the Cold War to provide the basis for considered opinions to have developed on the implications for Ireland of the first of these. That is not true of “the war against international terrorism”, so inevitably this part of the paper will necessarily be more speculative. Paradoxically it is also true to say that there has been less controversy over the impact of September 11, a reflection of the fact that settled opinion on its impact is harder to come by. THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND THE PEACE PROCESS Let me start with the end of the Cold War. The person most closely associated with the argument that the end of the Cold War had a major impact on the Irish peace process is Professor Michael Cox of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He first put forward the argument in an article in the October 1997 issue of International Af- fairs (Cox, 1997). He repeated it in his Frank Wright Memorial Lecture of February 1998 and in the book he co-edited with myself and Fiona Stephen, A Farewell to Arms?, published in 2000, as well as in a number of other journal articles. However, his most succinct statement of his argument is to be found in an article in the De- cember 1997/January 1998 issue of the magazine, Fortnight. I will quote the key passage: My thesis, simply stated, is that although the IRA ceasefire might have occurred without the end of the Cold War, the fact that the Cold War had drawn to a close made a ceasefire far more likely. Of course, the relationship between the end of the wider international conflict and the August 1994 announcement was never direct. What I am suggesting is that by altering completely the global framework within which the IRA campaign had hitherto been conducted, the end of the Cold War made it far more difficult for the organisation to legitimise a strategy which by the late 1980s had already reached a dead end. Moreover, with the end of the Cold War, a number of critical changes occurred in the structure of the international system. These not only challenged traditional republican thinking about the reasons for the British presence IBIS WORKING PAPER NO. 21 IBIS WORKING PAPERS NO. 21, 2002 in Ireland, but also presented its leaders with a unique opportunity which they felt could be exploited to their advantage. In particular, playing the “American card” to accelerate a peace process about which many on the British side had deep reserva- tions. Finally, as an organisation with a radical agenda, it was almost inevitable that the end of the Cold War, and with it the collapse of the wider revolutionary project, would influence the republican movement. (Cox, 1997-98: 20) Chatham House organised a lunchtime meeting on the peace process in Northern Ireland to coincide with the publication of Professor Cox’s article entitled “Bringing in the ‘international’: the IRA ceasefire and the end of the Cold War”. The meeting in late 1997 occurred shortly after a visit by Tony Blair to Northern Ireland, at which he shook hands with Gerry Adams for the first time. The prevailing mood of the meeting was not sympathetic either to the arguments that Professor Cox advanced on the international context of the peace process or to the peace process itself. There was widespread suspicion of the intentions of the republican movement. The principal line of argument of Professor Cox’s critics was that the ceasefire was a ploy to extract concessions from the government and that, unlike the end of the Cold War, it was a reversible decision, as its breakdown between February 1996 and July 1997 had already demonstrated. A number of speakers argued that the paramilitary ceasefires amounted simply to a truce in a long-running and ultimately unsolvable conflict. When Professor Cox presented his arguments in Belfast in February 1998 to an audience that included a number of specialists in the field of Irish politics, the case he presented also encountered considerable scepticism. But the basis of the criti- cisms was less hostility to the peace process than the conviction that it was a prod- uct of dynamics internal to Northern Ireland. In particular, for a number of Cox’s Belfast critics, it was the military defeat of the Provisionals’ campaign of violence in Northern Ireland that provided the key to explaining the ceasefires. However, since Cox was always careful not to dismiss the role that internal factors had played in bringing about an end to the troubles, it was difficult to fathom why the Cox thesis highlighting external factors should have provoked quite so much opposition. In his review of A Farewell to Arms?, Jonathan Tonge recounts another occasion on which a critic “demanded that the author be ‘more parsimonious’ with his variables” (Tonge 2001). Tonge himself faults Cox for the omission of important internal fac- tors and a suspect chronology. Tonge continues: Arguably the biggest shift from fundamentalist to pragmatic republicanism (at least before entry to Stormont in 1998) came with the decision of Sinn Féin to recognise the “partitionist” Dail Eireann in 1986, at a time when few were predicting the end of the Cold War, but internal republican critics (e.g. Ruairi O’Bradaigh) forecast later en- try to Stormont. Similarly, the willingness to engage in dialogue with the SDLP in 1988, again pre-collapse of the Berlin Wall, was indicative of the republican move- ment seeking an exit strategy from a war it could not win. Add the fact that republi- cans were suffering more losses than loyalists by the early 1990s and the internal thesis appears more convincing. (Tonge 2001: 263) I would not disagree with the proposition that there was a shift in republican think- ing in the late 1980s, not least as a by-product of the Anglo-Irish agreement of No- -2- Guelke / The international system and the peace process vember 1985. However, I would dispute the notion that it was more significant than the change that occurred in the 1990s.