Consociationalism is the Last Refuge of the Damned for a Reason

I firmly believe that Northern Ireland doesn’t work, Northern Ireland has never worked and Northern Ireland is never going to work. These are words which I am aware most Unionists who hear them finds very provocative.

The usual retort made when I, or any other Nationalist, makes that argument is that we are indulging in some wishful thinking. Nationalists after all want a United Ireland, this involves voters in the north deciding that a United Ireland is a superior choice to the status quo, therefore Nationalists have a motivation in undermining that status quo. Any Nationalist who claims Northern Ireland doesn’t work is therefore merely stating a very biased point of view, at least according to those objecting to the characterisation.

Am I therefore wrong to state my belief that Northern Ireland doesn’t work, has never worked and is never going to work? Is it merely the byproduct of my own biases and wishful thinking that blind me to the fact that in reality, things are going pretty well? Or is the traditional Unionist retort itself infested by bias, unwilling to acknowledge the emotional reality that the project of building a separate Ulster-British homeland on the island of Ireland has been a complete catastrophe? Obviously, I subscribe to the later interpretation. After all, just because someone is biased in favour of a certain outcome does not necessarily mean that their arguments in support of that outcome are wrong.

There have been three periods of governance in the history of Northern Ireland. The first, lasting from partition in 1921 to the fall of Stormont in 1972, saw the majoritarian and monolithic government of the Ulster Unionist Party who ruled uninterrupted for those 50 odd years. Did Northern Ireland ‘work’ in this period?

No.

Whilst arguably the most stable, this was only achieved by the effective exclusion of the nationalist community from the levers of power and institutional discrimination against that community. The stability proved to be a façade, coming undone during the 1960s as the resentment fostered by this approach reached boiling point.

The second period lasted from 1972 to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the years of direct rule alongside the Troubles. During this time the government was run by unelected (by the voters living here at least) officials from Great Britain, headed by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The opinion of the British government was pithily summed up by the Home Secretary Reginald Maulding who, upon returning from a visit in 1971, remarked ‘what a bloody awful country’ and asked for a scotch. From such men (and it was always a man until Mo Mowlam) were drawn our rulers for a quarter of a century, the post itself widely lampooned in British culture as a punishment posting for anyone who fell afoul of the Prime Minister of the day, and none of those who had a vote then had a say in our own government. Even the Unionists among us who may have expected to have the ear and sympathy of direct rule ministers were often blindsided or excluded from the decision-making process. Think of what Harold McCusker (then MP for Upper Bann) said in the House of Commons on the Anglo-Irish Agreement…

“I … asked the Government to put in my hand the document that sold my birthright. They told me that they would give it to me as soon as possible. Having never consulted me, never sought my opinion or asked my advice, they told the rest of the world what was in store for me.”

So, was this period wherein our votes didn’t influence how we were governed, was that ‘Northern Ireland working?’.

No, that was Northern Ireland being treated as a problem to be managed. If the first era failed because it excluded over a third of the population as a matter of principle, then the second era was unsustainable because it excluded everyone. So out of the one hundred and four years of the state’s existence, in seventy-seven it cannot be said to have ‘worked’.

Which brings us to the third era of governance, the era we now live in, ushered in amidst great pomp and fanfare and hope, the consociational era of the Good Friday Agreement. It is an era we have come to learn that is characterised by gridlock, collapse, endless negotiations, and increasing dysfunction.

So, is Northern Ireland working in this age? In fact, what does a state ‘working’ even mean?

Firstly, I would argue that a working state is one where politics is dominated by the issues, something we can see that sways voters in other places such as England or France or even the United States. The economy, the health service, infrastructure, education and others, these are always the foremost concerns for voters in democracy the world over.

In Northern Ireland it is the border first, second and third as proven time and again at the ballot box and politics is never conducted without reference to that border on any issue between those who want to remove it, those who want to preserve it and those who wish to argue the entire debate over the border is a distraction but who are mired in it regardless.

Secondly, I would argue that a working state, even one that is a devolved region of a much bigger state, should have a strong sense of self. Look for example at Scotland and Wales, our fellow devolved regions in the United Kingdom. These are both regions that have a strong sense of their own identity, their history and, while they have passionate over their future, the sense that whatever that future maybe it is one the entire country will face collectively, as Scotland or as Wales. In the hypothetical (and completely improbable) event that England were to leave the United Kingdom tomorrow, Scotland and Wales would pick up and carry on as Scotland and Wales.

Northern Ireland would last as long as it took for the news to filter through before the entire edifice spectacularly imploded. We are preserved by outside pressure, forces that must be continually supportive and intrusive to ensure we don’t spectacularly implode.

In other words, a state that works is one that is not preoccupied with questions over its own existence. A state whose political elites are so preoccupied tends to become obsessed with the question to the detriment of almost anything else.

The Good Friday Agreement attempted to create a such a system by erecting what Mark Durkan famously termed as ‘the ugly scaffolding’ of community designations, petitions of concerns, mandatory coalition and mutual vetoes to function as political training wheels. The hope was that we would, by consent, reform our own system and move towards a more normalised way to govern, that the constitutional question would become a background feature to our politics and that politicians would focus on delivering for the entire community, content to leave the border question for other days.

Suffice to say, these hopes were not realised.

The key moment of failure was probably the St. Andrew’s Agreement of 2006. This was the moment power passed out of the hands of consensus builders within the SDLP and the UUP and into that of the community defenders of the DUP and Sinn Féin, the extremes who had overtaken their more centrist counterparts in the previous years. The deal removed the previous mechanism by which the First and Deputy First Ministers were elected on a joint ticket, replacing it instead with a system by which the First Minister was drawn from the largest party, and the Deputy First Minister was chosen by the largest party of the other designation. This broke the tenuous link of a shared government, led to each subsequent election becoming a sectarian headcount as to who would grab the symbolic post of First Minister, and culminated in Paul Givan truthfully saying what we live under is not power-sharing.

In hindsight it was probably absurdly optimistic to believe that a consociationalism system of government was going to lead to normal politics. Consociational government always tends to empower community defenders, those in a divided society who promise their group they’ll hold the line against the nefarious interests of those outside the group at the expense of consensus builders, those who seek win-win outcomes through collaboration across the divides that necessitate consociationalism in the first place but who are then easily portrayed by the community defenders as naïve at best, or treacherous sell outs at worst. And our experience is far from unique.

The Wikipedia article on consociationalism defines it thusly

“Consociationalism is a form of democratic power sharing. Political scientists define a consociational state as one which has major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, but which remains stable due to consultation among the elites of these groups.”

Whilst I would argue our division is rooted mostly in our incompatible political aspirations, exacerbated by differing national identities and the vestiges of fading religiosity, the definition fits Northern Ireland like a glove. I would argue that the fact we have to use consociationalism is in itself an admission that this place doesn’t work. The system itself legitimises, entrenches and empowers the competing factions in a society by definition. Besides ourselves there are two other major examples of consociational government in the world today, that being Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Lebanon.

Lebanon’s system of government is innately sectarian, with roles allocated to members of certain sects, deeply entrenched political elites from each sect with a shared interest in plundering the state whilst remaining at loggerheads with everyone else and who have not been dislodged even though their collective mismanagement has ruined the national economy and of course, the inability to confront the heavily armed Hezbollah organisation which has dragged the country into a ruinous war with Israel twice in the past twenty years.

Bosnia, while a sovereign state, maybe a better analogue for Northern Ireland. The Bosnian Serb population aspires to have their distinct entity, Republika Srpska, leave Bosnia and to join with a Greater Serbia. These aspirations are kept in check by the presence of a High Representative (whom can be seen as a very, VERY rough analogue of our own Secretary of State), a foreign official given wide-ranging powers to intervene in Bosnian politics and the possibility that NATO countries could intervene decisively to protect Bosnia’s territorial integrity as they fear it could trigger a wave of irredentist conflicts in the Balkans. The Republika Srpska leadership in recent years has provoked several crises within the consociational Bosnian system. These crises culminated last month in the forcible removal, at the behest of the High Representative, of the entity’s leader Milorad Dodik.

This is only the most cursory examination of these states, but include them with Northern Ireland and you see a pattern. Both countries, like Northern Ireland, have deep internal divisions. Both countries, like Northern Ireland, adopted consociationalism as a system to resolve long-running and bloody conflicts. And both countries, like Northern Ireland, are politically unstable; the consociationalism at the heart of our systems not being about fixing the problems but managing them.

Can anyone say these countries are ‘working’? I don’t think they are.

In the Belfast Telegraph a few weeks back, Sam McBride informed us that some our MLAs received some very blunt advice from a man keen to cite Lebanon and Bosnia as examples of where we really don’t wish to go…

“The costs of inaction are clear: stagnation, elite preservation, loss of legitimacy, and gradual institutional decay — a Lebanon scenario in slow motion without the regional chaos. A fact-finding mission to Lebanon – and to Bosnia – would illuminate the long-term consequences of failing to reform power-sharing institutions. Lebanon is the supreme example of how unreformed power-sharing bargains can entrench elite cartels, corrode state capacity, lead to repeated outbreaks of war, and culminate in political, economic, and social breakdown. Northern Ireland faces a comparable risk if institutions fail to evolve with society; instability can persist beneath the surface even without overt conflict.”

These words were delivered by Michael Kerr, Professor of Conflict Studies at the Department of War Studies in King’s College London in his written submission to the ‘Assembly and Executive Review Committee’. The purpose of the committee, according to its own webpage, is in ‘…undertaking a review of institutional reform which follows on from the initial work by the previous AERC in the last Assembly mandate. The review will build on this and on other evidence which has arisen from subsequent academic research and parliamentary inquiries.’

Sam McBride writes that Kerr was making the case that for reform of the institutions is now ‘unassailable’…

‘The optimists who hoped against the evidence of history that the same parties working the same system might produce different results have been disproven. In many ways, the gross populism, tribalism and petty party politicking of this Stormont are worse because these people now have overwhelming evidence of the harm this behaviour has wrought in public services and in wider society.’

Kerr set out several proposals for reforming Stormont, to begin chipping away at the rotten foundations of our system of government, but Sam points out that the committee were palpably disinterested.

In a normal democracy, there is an election and afterwards the winners form a government around a shared vision of government and the losers retreat to lick their wounds, hold the government to account in opposition and strategize internally about swaying the electorate the next time. Loser’s consent is gained because everyone participating in the process agrees with the fundamentals; it is a vote on HOW the state should be run, not on the very nature of the state itself.

We don’t have that here, with Nationalists openly seeking to abolish the northern state and Unionists hoping to copper fasten its existence at every opportunity. Every vote is a proxy for the constitutional question and thus neither bloc would trust the other to govern alone because each bloc suspects that left to their own devices, their ideological opponents would use unrestrained power to further their goals on the constitutional question. And I would agree that on that point, each side is probably right.

Only mandatory coalition, yoking the parties together into an unhappy collective, offers a guarantee against that.  But in a compounding quirk, all nationalist parties are more left-wing than any of the Unionist parties and all Unionist parties are more right-wing than any of the nationalist parties. There is thus no common ideological ground between them on how to govern collectively. Mandatory coalition thus compels parties that describe themselves as socialist to share power with parties that are extremely conservative. The end result has been dysfunction, paralysis and jaw-dropping incompetence.

But this is exactly what a consociational system is supposed to do. In other words, the absence of conflict and the stability of government are the benchmarks for success, NOT effective government. On the absence of conflict we can judge Stormont a resounding success with there being nearly 30 years of relative peace. On the stability of government we can of course give a far more mixed verdict, alternating between periods of no government and periods of dysfunctional government. Yet each time Stormont collapses, the two governments strive to resuscitate it because realistically, right now, there are no alternatives.

And that is where we are. Mark Durkan was wrong. What he called the ugly scaffolding is in fact the true foundation of our politics. We are stuck with the only system that can actually function in our divided land, idly pondering alternatives or reforms we all know will never see the light of day as purely academic exercises, bemoaning a government that will never deliver because it was never designed to deliver and at the very best asking our politicians not to succeed, but simply to fail less. And in reality, I don’t even really blame our politicians, because that’s the easy way out. They have to operate the only system that works here, the system built on top of our divided, poisoned society.

So that’s my answer to the charge it is biased wish fulfilment driving my argument that Northern Ireland doesn’t work. Consociationalism is the last refuge of the damned, the political system resorted to when normal democracy won’t work. If anyone is able to build for themselves a decent life here, it is in spite of the state and system and most certainly not because of it. And the worst part is, I have little doubt that this is probably the best things are going to be for us.

I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.