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The elusiveness of trust on the ethnic fontier

IN REFLECTING on the current political situation I want to draw on the work of the political scientist Frank Wright, who died tragically young in 1994. In 30 years of analysis of the Northern Ireland situation Frank seems to me to have had the only original idea. He developed the idea of the ‘ethnic frontier zone’ and applied it not only to Northern Ireland but also to parts of Central Europe and further afield.

An ethnic frontier zone is where two groups with different national allegiances share the same territory. Obviously Northern Ireland is just such an ethnic frontier zone.

There are three aspects in relation to ethnic frontier zones which I want to highlight:

• The first is their relationship to the metropolitan power or powers; in Northern Ireland these are London and Dublin.
• The second is how the law and justice system operates in ethnic frontier zones.
• The third is how democracy operates in ethnic frontier zones.

Frank Wright argued that an ethnic frontier zone enables us to understand what a nation state is. He says that a nation state is where internal disturbers of the state can be effectively isolated, i.e. criminalised. Reciprocal violence and vengeance attacks can be controlled by the legal system. The legal system monopolises punishment and no one has a legitimate reason for taking the law into their own hands. In such a situation people more or less routinely trust each other; there is freedom from fear. The legal system is ‘above’ its citizens, it is a ‘transcendent’.

The second mark of a nation state is that the rules of democracy allow power to shift from one group to another, because all are part of the one nation-state – a state which is ‘above’ its citizens and where the ‘non-nationals’ are outside the state.

In ethnic frontier zones, by contrast, ‘the law relates differently to one community than to the other’ and ‘democratic rules are mere procedures in a battle whose results are never accepted’ because the context is always being argued about. Crucially, there is also little trust in ethnic frontier zones.

Frank Wright’s statement that in ethnic frontier zones ‘the law relates differently to one community than to the other’ is crucially important. And the reason is that the metropolitan power finds itself in a position of having to support one community over against the other. Thus, in Ireland, Britain has historically found itself supporting the position of Ulster Protestants over against Irish Nationalists. Wright has gone into great detail as to how this increasingly happened in 19th century Ulster, particularly over Orange marches.

What I want to highlight is this: when the law loses its transcendence, its ‘aboveness’, beyond all its citizens; it becomes aligned with one section of its citizens. Thus, it is no accident that issues of policing, decommissioning and criminal justice are some of the most intractable in Northern Ireland today.

Frank Wright says:

‘In national conflicts, law, order and justice are not just some of the issues that happen to arise from other causes. National conflicts, once they are fully developed, revolve round these matters.’

Wright has also highlighted the importance of deterrence relationships in ethnic frontier zones, i.e. a community has the power or seeks to have the power to deter the weaker community from doing something about the situation. What ‘peace’ there is is really a truce based on the power of deterrence, and thus force. A change in the balance of power, or whatever, can end the truce and set off a new cycle of conflict (eg 1969 in Northern Ireland). So the conflict can easily regenerate itself.

Once conflict starts again reciprocal violence becomes very difficult to suppress. Violence can spread from one incident in a chain reaction. For this process to work it is not necessary for people to agree with the violence done by their own community. They only have to understand what is happening and be frightened by it. Then, however much they dislike the violence done by their own people to others, the other side’s violence is seen to be more dangerous. This process can develop until communities end up accepting the protection of violent people in their own group, even if they know that they have played a big part in starting the situation in the first place. Thus we see how difficult it is to remove paramilitary and confrontationalist groups from conflict situations; people fear them but they also need them for protection.

Wright reaches the bleak conclusion that,

‘National conflicts [i.e. conflicts in ethnic frontier zones] do not, by and large, end up with reconciliation of antagonists. More commonly they are concluded by victories or mutual separation.’

He might also have added: ethnic cleansing. And we can instance all sorts of places in Europe where this has happened. It suggests why progress in Northern Ireland is very difficult, and why reconciliation remains elusive.

Is there any possibility of escape then?

Wright argued that the British and Irish governments must work together to provide a transcendence under which the two communities can come together. He saw the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 as moving in this direction and it can be argued that the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brings this sort of approach to fruition.

What has happened in the Good Friday Agreement is that the nationalist community and the unionist community have become equal in Northern Ireland and that both communities are upheld by British and Irish guarantees, and by the two governments working together (a sort of joint authority). The big new fact in Northern Irish politics is that since the early 1980s the two governments work together closely. What normally happens in ethnic frontier conflicts is that the metropolitan powers get drawn into supporting ‘their own’ community (eg Cyprus).

The new arrangements of the Good Friday Agreement were much more painful for unionists (at least at the beginning). These arrangements assumed communal equality and they provided confirmation that a British government would no longer support them over and against the nationalist community, although without abandoning them. Northern nationalists lost the ‘support’ of Articles II and III of the Irish Constitution but gained a closer involvement of the Irish government in Northern Ireland. (One of the difficulties, and forces for instability, here is the asymmetry between the Britain/Unionist relationship and the Northern Nationalist/rest of Ireland relationship). The Good Friday Agreement was an ambitious attempt to re-balance relationships between the two main communities where the two governments provide a context for unionists and nationalists to work together. It is not surprising, in retrospect, that it ran into difficulties.

There were big implications for policing brought about by the Good Friday Agreement. Remember I said that law and order is one of the key issues in ethnic frontier zones. Implicit in the Patton Commission Proposals was that the police no longer supported one community, i.e. the majority, over and against the other, i.e. the minority, nor would members of one community police another. Policing somehow became neutral as between the two main communities. At least that is the theory. And the minority were required to take responsibility for policing – and this may bring a lot of pain for it is an historic shift. It is not, therefore, surprising that Sinn Fein up to now has been unable to join the Policing Board.

A society which has been governed by a history of antagonism and which has had a law and order system that has supported one community is not easily going to move into a situation of trust. And so it has proven. Unionist failure to work the Good Friday Agreement institutions has symbolised distrust for nationalists and republicans. Republican failure to decommission and consign the IRA to history symbolises distrust for unionists. In a situation of distrust people still feel they need protection. Unionists increasingly vote for the DUP to protect their interests and to stand up to Sinn Fein. Nationalists increasingly vote Sinn Fein to protect their interests and to stand up to the DUP.

Another way to see it is in the terms of the depressing ‘bigots and bastards’ scenario: given a choice between your bigots and our bastards we vote for our bastards (nationalists). And given a choice between our bigots and your bastards we vote for our bigots (unionists). The positive in the situation is that protection no longer requires the overt threat (or actuality) of physical violence (but, of course, they have not gone away you know). At the same time the diminishing threat (and use) of physical violence has allowed large sections of the middle classes to opt out of politics and any civic responsibility. The conflict has mutated into less violent forms: cultural wars and fights about victims. And the nationalist and unionist middle classes can ignore each other: ‘benign’ apartheid, the peace of the suburbs.

A second positive is that the DUP and Sinn Fein have become more moderate – they have moved into the middle ground of unionism and nationalism respectively.

The issues now become: Can the DUP and Sinn Fein construct a deal? Or does the present limbo situation continue for a long period? Does thirst for power beat deep antagonism? What would a deal between the DUP and Sinn Fein look like? And what would this mean for the rest of us? Is it institutionalised sectarianism forevermore? One thing is clear: the two governments will not easily give up on the peace process.

The present situation is still sort of desperate but less serious. Visions of positive relationships have failed to be translated into political reality but we are unlikely to see large scale violence again. Ambiguous greyness has triumphed. We must – sometime – be able to do better than this limping along present, with our patches and our moans and our deformities.

The references to Frank Wright are from two articles: ‘Reconciling the History of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland and the British-Irish Relationship’ in Eds Alan D Falconer and Joseph Leichty Reconciling Memories, Columba Press (2nd Edition 1998).

DAVID STEVENS is Leader of the Corrymeela Community.

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