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Times ChangeQuarterly Political & Cultural Magazine |
'Armed Peace' will wreck Belfast AgreementArthur Aughey writes that so long as weapons continue to be held by paramilitary groups then there can be no real sense that the war is over This is the first anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement. It is also the tenth anniversary of the "fall" of the Berlin Wall. As it became clear that the talks about the future of Northern Ireland were coming to a positive conclusion, that man of the memorable soundbite, David Ervine, proposed that the Agreement was the local equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In terms of world-historical significance this was an obvious exaggeration. But one might be forgiven for thinking that there is a parallel. 1989 changed the character of German politics and with it the politics of Europe. The equally rapid pace of events in Northern Ireland over the last year has held out similar hopes for positive change. It is worth pursuing a little further the Berlin Wall analogy. In his recent book, The Ghosts of Berlin, Brian Ladd tells of a vast lot at the junction of the districts of Pankow and Wedding where the huge slabs of concrete which formed the Wall are now ground up for usable gravel. The Wall, he writes, had been Berlin's premier tourist attraction. He continues: "If a monument can be decommissioned, that is apparently what has happened to the Berlin Wall".The concrete has lost its aura. It has, so to speak, lost its power to kill. It no longer has its murderous properties. The momentous events of November 1989 did not remove the Wall immediately. "What had disappeared", argues Ladd, "was the symbolic Wall - which meant that the concrete and the symbol were no longer the same". Yet before the Wall could be forgotten, before the city could regain its completeness, the Wall had to be removed physically. That, I feel, is the relevant Berlin analogy for Northern Ireland. Here not only did the "concrete" reality of illegal weaponry remain after April 10, 1998; so too did the symbolism. And so long as these weapons continue to be held by paramilitary groups then there can be no real sense that the war is over. There can be no completeness, no moving on. For the greatest obstacle to the inclusive politics intimated in the Agreement is the politics of threat, the "armed peace". And it is the politics of threat which still makes people feel vulnerable and exposed. It is the politics of threat which means that many - especially unionists - remain unpersuaded of the advantages of the Agreement. It is often difficult to explain this when the notion of "the silence of the guns" seems so convenient. Let's try "castration anxiety". Castration anxiety is that point at which threat takes precedence over actuality and produces real effects. It might be said that power can be exercised in the guise of a potential threat, that is, insofar as it does not strike but keeps itself in reserve. That appears to be the current IRA strategy and one its Sinn Fein spokespersons have concluded will be more effective than the actual use of force. It is the threat of IRA violence which, so unionists believe, is now being used to skew democratic procedure and influence policy. Its real effect, however, will be to destroy the potential of the Agreement. That potential lies in the possibility of addressing Northern Ireland's peculiar version of the "Sudeten syndrome". As Konrad Henlein explained it in a letter to Berlin in 1938: "We must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied". To which must be added in Northern Ireland's case: "We must always offer so little that they can never be satisfied". This can now change and change for the better. There are definite political benefits which accrue directly to every party prepared to adopt the values of Agreement politics. But the politics of inclusivity proposed in the Agreement can only be inclusive of those who subscribe equally to liberal democratic procedure. All parties must equally esteem the value of exclusively peaceful methods. No party can reserve to itself the politics of threat. The politics of inclusivity, in other words, must have its own exclusions. This was the conclusion arrived at by Bertie Ahern, in his comments to the Sunday Times of 14th February. Mr Ahern said that it was 'illogical, unfair and unreasonable' for Sinn Fein (or any other paramilitary grouping) to expect to take the general advantages of the Agreement ithout fulfilling its particular responsibilities. Intimating a common set of expectations North and South, he argued that: 'Being part of a government, or part of an executive, [is not possible] without at least a commencement of decommissioning, and that would apply in the North and in the South. That is what we need to achieve'. This position is fully in line with the logic of the agreement. It is what Ahern carried through in the Hillsborough Declaration of 1 April. So long as the Irish Government is prepared to set the principled limits to nationalist ambition, unionists can - willingly or reluctantly - honour their part of the bargain. A final Berlin reflection. In Wim Wenders' film Der Himmel Uber Berlin the
character Homer, in reflecting on the experience of Germans, seeks to substitute for the
epic of war an epic of peace. For the moment, the last line of Wenders' film is apt: Nous
sommes embarques. But only if Sinn Fein gets real. Arthur Aughey lectures in politics at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown |
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