English - BICC

ief 22
Matters of Trust:
External and
Internal
Involvement for
Disarmament
Northern Ireland serves as a superb
example of how a peace process
can be influenced and affected by a
complex interplay of exogenous and
endogenous stimuli. External
governmental and non-governmental
actors, and internal players, whether
they be the conflict’s principal political
protagonists or elements of civil
society, have interacted in a manner
that has produced a tenuous division
of labour that has exhibited severe
imbalances during various phases of
the peace process. We would agree that
this interplay, which can be described
as first-, and second-track diplomacy
(Fitzduff, 2001), has been vital in
developing trust and dialogue across
sectarian lines between 1994 and 1998,
and, most importantly, for achieving a
political settlement to the enduring
conflict with the signing of the peace
accord in April 1998. Nonetheless, the
post-Agreement implementation phase,
which can be described as the crucial
second phase of peace-building,
suffered a great deal from the lack of
new impulses for confidence-building.
What happened? An impact of the
Agreement, which can be elucidated as
the top-down effect, curtailed the
flexibility of both external third parties
and internal bottom up initiatives: The
prominent outside facilitator of
negotiations, former US-Senator
George Mitchell, left the stage,
abandoning the Commission on
Decommissioning, which, with a
limited mandate, was grappling with
the most contentious issue of the
peace process. Civil society, after
numerous creative interventions during
the peace talks that were not always
enthusiastically appreciated by local
politicians, including its profound
public appeals in the “Yes Campaign”
that ultimately led to the referendum
of May 1998 (Oliver, 1998), were
deprived of their influence on policy
when the implementation process was
narrowed down to the unproductive
“guns versus government” controversy.
Outsiders: How
neutral can they get?
The specifics of external involvement
in Northern Ireland (Mac Ginty, 1997;
Arthur, 2000; Grove, 2001; Mac Ginty
and Darby, 2002, pp. 106-122)—the
British-Irish guardianship forming a
unique “tandem” model of bipartisan
conflict management inaugurated by
the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985,
emergent American interventionism
during the Clinton administration in
response to the impassioned
exhortations of the Irish-American
diaspora, and the Special Support
Programme of the EU since 1994—
have given the conflict a distinctly
58 B·I·C·C
international aura. It is somewhat
paradoxical that a conflict which has
never posed a genuine threat to
international security and never been
subjected to UN mediation or
intervention would become so
internationalised. Outside involvement
in Northern Ireland would prove its
relevance predominantly for the
unsolved domestic security issues of a
protracted low-intensity conflict, and in
particular for the solution of the
impasse surrounding decommissioning.
The most evident examples are George
Mitchell’s brokering role for the peace
accord and the review process of the
Agreement in autumn 1999, the
Agreement’s provision for independent
international commissions on
decommissioning and policing, and the
role of the international inspectors
visiting IRA arms dumps since summer
2000.
The manner in which a concert of
powerful outsiders assumed
guardianship of the peace process
should not necessarily be equated with
genuine third party intervention. Most
external actors chose to adopt an
approach emphasizing facilitation
rather than intervention; the
“neutrality” of third parties was
regularly contested by local politicians
in Northern Ireland; “they had to be
approved by the British and Irish
governments and yet retain enough
distance from the governments to be
regarded as truly independent” (Mac
Ginty and Darby, 2002, p.120).
Nationalists and Republicans have,
above all other groups, demonstrated
an ardent determination to
internationalise the conflict. The
premise upon which this position has
been based is that the ultimate
overarching political goal of a united
Ireland can only be achieved with Irish
and US involvement in the peace
process. In contrast, Unionists and
Loyalists, endeavouring to reaffirm
their British identity, have been wary of
placing faith or trust in initiatives