NORTHERN IRELAND: ENDING THE TROUBLES?

...Hence the ceaseless process of sectarian demarcation and discrimination that inhabitants and observers of Northern Ireland describe...

...But it is important to insist upon the inconsistencies of a propaganda campaign that judges British 91 military behavior by the standards of a peaceful civil society, while simultaneously claiming the rights of military men-at-arms for its own combatants...

...The Catholic population is largest in the west and the south, and in West Belfast...

...The threat of injury or death to members of one's own community is, of course, the most potent mode of reinforcing collective identity, and paramilitary forces are able to claim support as defenders and avengers of their communities...

...He suggested that while there were no apparent formal rules of conflict resolution, there were nevertheless homeostatic tendencies that led each side to limit the damage it did to the other, maintaining communal antagonisms and thus the position of leaderships at a steady and stable level...

...A majority in one part of a territory becomes a minority when one considers the territory as a whole...

...It could purchase land and houses at an advantageous price from members of either community seeking to relocate themselves as part of this program...

...In my view, this separation, endorsing the claims to "self-determination" of both Protestant and Catholic communities without subordinating one to the other, is the essential basis for making any progress...

...No doubt, significant minorities would, for one reason or another, place retention of their existing homes above any other consideration...

...States habitually seek a monopoly of physical violence within their area of jurisdiction, and in the absence of the chronic pattern of communal antagonism and conflicting nationalisms, which now characterize Northern Ireland, it is likely that successor states would acquire more of these conventional powers...

...no injuries to its members (mostly outsiders) are likely to jeopardize the state of stable tension needed to maintain the status quo...

...Self-determination for both Catholics and Protestants, within separate states if this is what each community would choose, seems the appropriate resolution of an undecidable conflict of "majority" and "minority" rights...

...Substantial economic assistance might be sought and obtained from the European Economic Community, the EEC, and from the United States in pursuit of such a long-term resolution of the problem of Northern Ireland...

...At the level of everyday life, the salience of "the other" would become less, and space would appear for the emergence of other differentiations...

...With the increased influence in Protestant politics of Ian Paisley, and the increasing political legitimacy of Sinn Fein and the Provisionals since the 1981 hunger strike, polarization now is more severe than since the beginning of the Troubles...

...For the Republican Catholics, it is the population of the whole of Ireland, with its Catholic majority, that should have the decisive voice in determining the government of the North...

...Conflict between provinces or states, across a frontier, is likely to be less pervasive and more limited in its scope...

...Meanwhile the recession has hit Northern Ireland particularly hard, and the region suffers from very high levels of unemployment, especially among the young...

...But it is my view that the present impasse in Northern Ireland is so profound, and its cost to the people of the province so great, that it is appropriate to consider these questions of physical location, upsetting as they may be...

...It is hard to envisage a more optimistic and progressive climate in British politics taking shape while the Northern Ireland situation remains in its present intractable and shameful state...

...But more private and differentiated identities are also squeezed in a situation of continuous communal pressure...

...For the Protestants, it is the population of the United Kingdom as a whole, with veto power for the population of Northern Ireland (with its 2:1 Protestant majority...

...If this solution is to be considered further, it seems necessary to contemplate the physical redistribution of part of the Catholic and Protestant population, so that a pattern of local concentration and territory-wide dispersal evolves into a more concentrated form of settlement...

...A Catholic province could also choose independence, membership in the Irish Republic, or some form of association with both British and Irish states...

...A strategy that over a reasonable length of time might resolve this historic problem on a permanent basis is worth consideration...

...Association with British soldiers is a reason for punishment...

...A mere redrawing of frontiers, given existing distributions of population, would go only a little way toward achieving this pattern of uniform national identities within distinct territorial boundaries...

...It would be possible to outline, at an early stage, the approximate boundaries of the new provinces/states, taking into account the existing population distribution, sensible frontiers, and the need to create two viable economies...

...On the other hand, the Protestants of Ulster have demonstrated the force of their aversion to the Catholic South, and to any subordination within a United Ireland...

...There is a curious symmetry between the Protestants' insistence on loyalty to a state to which in practice they have not been in the least loyal, and the Republican movement's commitment to a united Ireland, despite its lack of sympathy for the actual government and social order of the Republic...

...There can be no justification for a form of government that denies the Catholic population both its preferred national identity, and the rights and powers of self-rule...

...All the parties to the conflict argue for solutions they claim would be democratic...

...We should recognize and admit that Northern Ireland as now constituted is not viable, and that the claims of its two communities are, and seem likely to remain, fundamentally incompatible with one another...

...For a period of ten years, since the collapse of the "power-sharing" Executive under the impact of the Ulster Workers' Strike of 1974, the problems of Northern Ireland have seemed virtually insoluble...

...The claims of the Protestants of Northern Ireland not to be subordinated to a Catholic majority also have some symmetrical legitimacy, regardless of the greater sympathy one might have for the claims of the community that historically has been subordinated and illtreated...

...A recent study of the feasibility of repartition,2 given the existing population distribution, estimated that the most favorable redefinition of boundaries, which would involve separating the predominantly Catholic west and south from the existing territory of Northern Ireland, would still leave a very substantial number of Catholics in the remaining area...

...I propose a redefinition of the problem...

...Each community has its history, its music, its days of celebration and mourning...

...Political opinion in the two communities in the North has polarized, and the more extreme forces on each side have gained in strength...

...There are predominant concentrations of Catholic and Protestant populations in different areas...

...It could then resell land and property, on favorable terms, to incoming populations...

...The difficulties in the face of the peaceful redrawing of boundaries and the relocation of peoples are so great that substantial investments would be needed, so that people would have the promise of a better material life to justify what would in some instances be a serious loss regarding their sense of "home" and their historic territorial rights...

...Similar rights and benefits could be offered to the holders of council (subsidized) tenancies, in terms of equivalent It may be significant that the name Londonderry was recently officially changed to its popular (Catholic) form of Derry...

...I would not want to minimize the experiences of a people subjected to military occupation, or the brutalized habits of soldiers in such a situation...

...93 rights and financial assistance...

...Northern Ireland is uniquely characterized (compared with the spatial separations of French Canada or the French- and Flemishspeaking areas in Belgium) by a pattern of local communal segregation, and broader-scale territorial intermixture...

...Rights of self-government should not be forfeited as a result of such a history, nor can they be accorded simply on the basis of moral sympathies...

...Clearly, the cooperation of the Irish Republic would be of crucial importance...

...The imperial origins of the Protestant settlement cannot have much weight today in deciding the territorial rights of a population originally settled 300 years ago...

...It should also be pointed out that very large numbers of people have already moved their homes in the course of the Troubles—possibly no more than would be involved in the moves here considered...

...This situation of "social feud" enables us to understand the futility of the claims of both opposed nationalisms...

...But the effects of continued terrorism, even in remote areas, reenforce authoritarian, irrational, and paranoid states of mind, and generally reduce confidence in the possibilities of rational and peaceful change...

...Streets and estates are Protestant or Catholic territory...

...As all parties to the conflict have always realized, the British government's definition of the problem is itself an important factor in determining the behavior of the participants...

...The British government could assist in a process of relocation not only by indicating its long-term intentions and by appropriately planned investment, but also by intervention in the housing market...

...The sociologist Douglas Young, writing about this situation in 1973 after two years' research in Northern Ireland,' went so far as to argue that this state of conflict was self-equilibrating, providing a social identity and moral satisfaction for its participants that is far more potent than anything else available...

...In this scheme, the British government would allow a choice of preferred modes of government for each community, allowing neither jurisdiction over the choices of the other...

...It is only the possibility that the British government could take some autonomous step toward resolving the problem that makes this solution conceivable without a civil war...

...But the knot of this problem has been tied extremely tight, and there is no easy formula for loosening it...

...It has hardly been given public consideration, but it may be the only means available of providing a permanent solution short of full-scale civil war...

...The emphasis in the public rituals of Northern Ireland on public mourning for deaths suffered for the sectarian cause can also be explained by the intense preoccupation of each of these communities with their relationship to the other...

...Those whose political programs for the North depend on the active use of armed force seem ill-placed to criticize this admittedly radical proposal on grounds of humanitarianism and human rights, though this will assuredly not stop them from doing so...

...Both claims, if enacted, would lead to a civil war that no one in fact wants...

...The entire failure to consider the possibilities of securing self-determination for both communities, by means of some form of separated jurisdiction, might in this context be described as a "symptomatic absence...

...While exploring the difficulties of finding a solution in the terms that are usually discussed, I shall argue for an option of repartition...

...the Protestants are concentrated in the east-central area, including Belfast where they comprise more than three-quarters of the population...

...or in a mainly Protestant state...

...There are wider benefits to political development in Britain that might follow from a settlement of the Northern Irish problem...

...It is in this sense a compromise of a different type from those previously discussed...

...If they did, the Partition of 1922 would not have taken its terrible form, and it would have been easier to modify in later years...

...It is neither possible nor desirable to suppress the demands of these communities by force...

...Once separate states or jurisdictions were established, it seems likely that minority communities staying (perhaps by their own choice) within the boundary of the other would be subject to stringent demands for their loyalty and conformity...

...The existing distribution of the population ensures that substantial numbers both of Catholics and Protestants would be involved in movement, and this sharing of loss and gain by both communities would provide an important element of equity...

...There can be few who believe that the search for compromises between the two communities can now possibly succeed...

...Security would become a more ordinary problem, since the management of law and order would no longer be superimposed on communal conflict, and police and military force would no longer, for the Catholic population, be in the hands of aliens to their community (whether Protestant or British...

...There are various contested ways of referring to Northern Ireland itself—as "Ulster," or "the Six Counties," or "the Province," or "the North of Ireland," depending on communal or national identification...

...The institution of the feud can be highly stable even where opposed sides appear to work ceaselessly for each other's destruction...

...It is difficult to assess the more diffuse cultural and social effects of such an intractable armed struggle, especially given the tendency of mainland Britain to distance itself from the events of Northern Ireland...

...How could Ulster Protestantism maintain its archaic fervor if it were not for the threat of Rome...

...Although the security forces achieve local successes (recently through the use of informers), there is no sign of the decisive victory that is sometimes reported to be in the offing...

...To gain legitimacy among Catholics, "power sharing" requires not only some equity in the internal division of power and resources but also some commitment to the ultimate unity of all Ireland...

...More specifically, the solidarity already seen among Protestant industrial workers might come to be deployed against, instead of in alliance with, the dominant Protestant bourgeoisie, and a Catholic working class habituated to relatively high standards of secular liberties and welfare legislation might seek to transfer these expectations to a Republican setting...

...Belfast would have to be Protestant, despite the great difficulties posed by the large Catholic population that would, over a period of years, have to move or accept a permanent subordinate status in the U.K...

...Since Northern Ireland is currently economically dominated by Belfast and has a pattern of communications centering on that city, it would be necessary to undertake substantial infrastructural investment, in the period preparatory to repartition, to ensure that a territory that excluded Belfast nevertheless was economically viable...

...This idea of moving populations has seemed, understandably, "unthinkable" during This appeared as a chapter by Paul Compton ("The Demographic Background") in David Watt, ed., The Constitution of Northern Ireland: Problems and Prospects (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1981...

...Douglas A. Young's paper, "Northern Ireland: a Case of the Non-Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour," drew on the ideas of Georg Simmel on conflict as a stable form of social relation...

...In particular, the large Catholic population of West Belfast explains why a relatively simple territorial realignment does not achieve the desired effects...

...These are additional grounds for encouraging the most open discussion of alternative options and arguments and for breaking the official consensus that seems to envisage no more than longterm containment...

...Names— both first names and surnames—are Protestant or Catholic...

...Instead, social space has had to be continually asserted and marked out...

...While the 1981 Census results are likely to demonstrate further significant population movements and an increased homogeneity within each segment of the mosaic, these movements have not redistributed the population substantially by region, which is the redistribution that could do most to further a resolution of the sectarian conflict...

...This street ritual serves also to mark out ownership and exclusion of physical space...

...Essential to this argument, however, is the view that if there could be a boundary—a more conventional kind of frontier— then communal conflict would become less oppressive...

...Just as important as the conflicts over the 88 internal government of the North are the wider national aspirations of the two communities...

...On the one hand, as Eamonn McCann has put it, The Provos will not be beaten while there is no generally accepted political solution...

...The moral complexity arises from the partial justice of the claims of both communities to live under governments of their own choosing...

...Nevertheless, according to a report based on 1971 Census figures, Catholics are in a majority of more than 70 percent in only 2 out of 26 district councils...

...The evocations of the Battle of the Boyne have their meaning in the affirmation of the ever-threatened existence of a sectarian community...

...If the Catholic and Protestant populations were nearer to numerical parity, the case for an equitable sharing of political power between the two communities would be consistent with majoritarian principles...

...Nor is the assertion that the Northern Irish state is merely a dependency of British imperialism unproblematic, given the negative economic and political value of the region to the United Kingdom today...

...Both of these factors would lessen the enthusiasm of both British and Irish governments for such a resolution, though such a threat is probably too long-term and indeterminate to weigh very heavily in anyone's calculations...

...The Apprentice Boys' March around the walls of Derry each July, and its ritual humiliation of the Catholic territory below the walls, is the bestknown example of this territorial assertion...

...But there is no agreement on the relevant national community within which democratic decisions should be made...

...The demography of Northern Ireland is unfavorable to a peaceful resolution...

...Such a proposal involves real losses for both nationalisms...

...The conflicts, both over domestic administration and national affiliations, are irreconcilable under present conditions...

...It seems that Derry,' in such a repartition, would be wholly part of the Catholic territory...

...These estimates suggest that a repartition ceding the largest feasible area of contiguous territory would change a distribution of population that is now about 62 percent Protestant and 38 percent Catholic to one that would be 74 percent Protestant and 26 percent Catholic...

...Such a change does not meet the objective of enabling the larger part of the Catholic population to escape from Protestant hegemony, without inverting the present situation by subordinating the Protestant minority...

...The justice of the claims of the longoppressed and subordinated Catholics of the North needs no elaboration here...

...Its particular effect has been to reenforce the social category and moral boundary of "Catholic" and "Protestant" for each community...

...Intermarriage between religions is frowned upon and unusual...

...A Protestant province could choose independence, or remain associated with the United Kingdom...

...92 the years of the Troubles so far...

...While initiatives continue to be explored in the North and the South, it seems unlikely that the two Northern Irish communities can be persuaded to agree to any substantial proposals...

...These affirmations and rejections have proved a much more powerful social force than any at the disposal of reform-minded governments in London or Belfast...

...The Republicans refuse to recognize that the achievement of "Troops Out" might in practice mean a civil war in which the Protestants would be better placed than the Catholics in terms of arms and military organization...

...Socialists have often pointed out how the former stratifying or oppositional principle of social class has been displaced by religion in Northern Ireland...

...A political and economic order could evolve in which religious affiliation would no longer determine power and authority...

...Each side rejects the legitimacy of the other's claims...

...This pattern of population distribution has more than administrative importance...

...It is hard to see the possibility of any long-term pacification while communities are interlocated as they are...

...Given the dynamics of the conflict, any compromise that promised to resolve it would meet with resistance, for fear of the empty social space that would then have to be faced...

...It is, however, likely that the displacing of sectarian conflict as the predominant issue of Northern Irish politics would lead to more open class divisions in both Protestant and Catholic communities, and might in time open the way to the emergence of a more universalistic, rational, and class-based political community...

...The fact is that claims of self-determination are virtually "undecidable" in such a situation...

...Sectarian assassinations, attacks on the British army and on local security forces in Northern Ireland, and bombings on the mainland continue sporadically...

...Even the most drastic repartition of mainly Catholic areas contiguous to the Republic would leave nearly half the Catholic population of about 576,000 in a mainly Protestant province, and would place 200,000 out of 954,000 Protestants in predominantly Catholic territory...

...The Provos (the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA) define themselves as soldiers but are denounced by the British government as mere terrorists and criminals...

...The pattern of intercalated settlement that maintains sectarian antipathy also makes a solution by territorial separation difficult to achieve...

...One would expect that the British government would also direct economic assistance toward the inauguration of a Catholic province, even if this were to choose absorption in the Irish Republic, as part of its obligation to its present citizens...

...The process of increased militarization and civil surveillance set in motion by the security campaign in Northern Ireland would be arrested, and it would again become easier to defend civil liberties throughout the United Kingdom...

...A state of permanent civil conflict is not one to which we should become resigned, as policy-makers in Britain seem to be...

...A concept of "national divorce" suggests itself...

...Arguments based on the existence of a "majority" of Protestants have little weight, given the circumstances of Partition in 1922, the pressing weight of the history of Ireland and its relations with England, and the actual preferences of the Catholics of the North...

...Protestants in Catholic Ireland might thus be subject to "Catholic laws" (from which they are now protected by the secularism and religious indifference of the British state...

...This is now complicated by the communal support for them and by the broad Catholic support for Republican aims...

...The long history of discrimination in industrial investment between "Catholic" and "Protestant" areas would again require deliberate redress, which might be easier once the veto of Protestant power within a unitary state was overcome...

...These sectarian communities, as they are currently constituted, each need the existence of the other...

...Those in Britain who have at times speculated about the salutary effects that a British threat to withdraw from Northern Ireland might have on the conflict have had some awareness of the role British intervention has played (among others) as a kind of coping stone to the whole structure...

...Only a confederation of Britain and the Irish Republic could square that circle, but that has never seemed a very practical political option...

...There is, as well, the evident hope of many British governments since 1968 that the Protestants would accept some dilution both of their own power and of Britain's sovereignty over the territory...

...What follows is the need to separate the claims of each community to self-government from their claims to exercise government over each other...

...The pattern of settlement is a mosaic, whose separate pieces have become more homogeneous during the Troubles as both Protestants and Catholics have fled from exposed or mixed areas, which are, however, still relatively small and interspersed with one another...

...Even ten years might not be too much...

...Even the notorious punishments meted out to traitors and suspected informers —tarrings and featherings, knee-cappings, and 90 the rest—have a specific ritual force in this culture of shame, in which obligations of membership combine with more utilitarian considerations of deterrence...

...As in the instructive parallel case of the Falkland Islands, it should be noted that there are real moral complexities as well as intransigent political factors operating to impede a solution...

...It concluded that repartition was unfeasible without considerable population exchange...

...The close conjunction of areas of friendly and hostile territory provides both a secure base for the organization of paramilitary action and easy access to potential targets...

...For the Republicans, the problem is defined as one of British imperialism, and the intransigent opposition of the Protestants to any all-Irish solution is just wished away...

...And there will be no generally accepted solution while the Provos remain unbeaten...

...This, no doubt, reinforces the influence of paramilitary organizations in the depressed local communities...

...While a solution that requires physical movement of significant numbers of people is abnormal and intrinsically undesirable, it seems less so than the indefinite persistence of the present situation...

...I would attach particular importance to this pattern of locally homogeneous, mixed, but not integrated settlement...

...Neither side possesses an unchallenged physical territorial space, in which a taken-forgranted sense of identity could develop, leaving time for other internal social distinctions to be elaborated...

...The commemoration of the final sacrifice is a claim on the allegiance of the living, and also a celebration of the faithfulness of the dead...

...Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland do not live in 89 clearly demarcated and self-contained parts of the territory...

...Violence and the threat of violence have a particularly important effect on the maintenance of communal identity, and the spatial pattern of settlement described above undoubtedly lends itself to a pervasive and unpredictable potential for violence...

...Such negative prospects might also encourage population movement once the intention to define new boundaries at the end of a stated period were declared...

...The resolution of this aspect of the British 94 "national problem" might also open the way to some general dismantling of the more coercive and centralizing aspects of the British national state, making it more possible to concede appropriate measures of regional and national self-government within the remainder of the British Isles...

...In Britain, certainly, any serious consideration of greater regional or national autonomy now rapidly comes up against the problem of extending the proposed devolution to the Northern Ireland case...

...Young argued that in Northern Ireland sectarian conflict had become an end in itself: the process of mutual self-definition by each side in terms of the hated, despised, or feared qualities of the other dominates the formation of values and identity in each community...

...Catholics and Protestants would each provide leadership in their own terrain...

...Halfway houses are hard to find here, since from the Protestant point of view any legitimation of a united Ireland is a step toward accepting minority status for themselves...

...Therefore the British government should seek a solution that respects the rights of self-determination of both communities by redefining boundaries and facilitating the movements of people...

...Any proposals for resolving such a deep-seated historical problem must depend on some model of analysis that allows the identification of potentially critical variables...

...How much priority would most Catholics give to the cause of a United Ireland if they were no longer subjected to Protestant power and humiliation...

...The particular pattern of settlement gives a quite distinctive sociological character to the conflict within Northern Ireland, furthering a particular form of domination by Protestant over Catholic and reenforcing the historic antagonisms of the two communities...

...Viewed from this perspective the British army of occupation has a most convenient function...

...This is all a far cry from envisaging a socialist future for any part of Ireland...

...Catholics might find themselves subject to something more like "Stormont" government than has existed in recent years...

...As it is, the Catholic population is much too large a proportion of the total to be discounted, yet too small to support an arithmetic case for equity or to lead to the close matching of electoral forces that would produce equity—for example, through the agency of a balancing center party...

...From this point of view, the intolerance of compromise, the ease with which its advocates have been repeatedly forced to the margins, and the lack of interest in any solutions that might be workable are again consistent with a pattern of pathological confrontation...

...To point to the selfdestructiveness of Irish nationalist strategy does in no way deny the history of callousness toward the Catholic population...

...In any case, while a British government might indicate its future proposals for redefining sovereignty in the province, and the principles and approximate geographical lines of repartition it envisages, it would be left to individual citizens to determine, in the conditions prevailing and anticipated, where they wished to live...

...And there are the endless processions and marches, so distinctive a feature of Northern Irish life, in which each side's social identity is affirmed by insult and by confrontation with "the other...

...The Northern Ireland conflict, in fact, now seems interminable...

...Such a program of communal separation and repartition must be allotted a substantial period of preparation...

...Possibly about as much priority as is now given by the population of the Republic...

...The claims of self-determination for both communities are, of course, uniquely difficult to realize in Northern Ireland...

...Berlin" solutions of a divided city, with different sovereignties over different segments, do not seem promising...

...The paper is unfortunately unpublished...