The Foreign Service Journal, April 2016

44 APRIL 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL This latter development came to matter a lot after John Major became prime minister in 1990, because an element of his approach to finding a way out of a dead-end process was a declaration from Downing Street that the United Kingdom did not have a constitutional commitment to Northern Ireland. Consequently, should a majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens choose to reunite with the Irish Republic, a key nationalist goal, Westminster would not object. The Good Friday Agreement In the early 1990s, John Hume, a farsighted, moderate nationalist Irish politician, challenged Gerry Adams—leader of Sinn Fein, the Irish republican political party, and an impor- tant critic of the status quo—to consider the reality of the country’s difficult history. It was clear, Hume argued, that the IRA and Irish nationalism will not be forced out of politics by the British Army. But neither would the IRA succeed in driving the British out of Northern Ireland at the point of a gun. So there were only two options, Hume argued. We can perpetuate the current cycle of contempt, violence and stale- mate—or we can find another way to govern ourselves that fosters peace and security, protecting minority rights while respecting the majority’s role in government and the making of public policy. The alternative turned out to be the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, which established a new power-sharing govern- ment in Belfast. The document guaranteed participation in the legislative process in proportion to a party’s electoral strength at the polls; a revised prosecution service and court structure to minimize the opportunity for bias in the administration of justice; a substantially modified police force to make enforce- ment of the law as fair as possible for both communities; and a scaling back of the British Army’s profile in Northern Ireland to normal peacetime levels. The agreement forthrightly declares: “The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suf- fering.” It then calls for reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust, and the promotion of human rights of all. Implementation took considerable time, frequently leading to arguments and even some pushing and shoving, but the negotiators made real progress as the new arrangements were set up and bedded in. Ever since then, it appears that a spirit of accommodation of others’ views and concerns has increasingly prevailed in Northern Ireland’s parliamentary debate, as well as within the administration of government—even in relations between the nationalist and unionist communities at every level. Toward a Parity of Esteem A few years ago I asked the Belfast playwright and author Marie Jones, whose marvelous one-act play, “A Night in November,” I had just seen staged at a Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., if the new generation growing up in Northern Ireland would recognize the world her play so vividly describes. She replied quite fiercely, “My 10-year-old already doesn’t know what the fuss was all about.” The fact that the next generation will not experience the bigotry and bitterness of the Troubles is a very good thing, indeed. To be sure, there are still issues that provoke civic dis- sension. There is still too much name-calling in Irish politics; and there are still too many who fail to see the need for what in Northern Ireland is called “parity of esteem.” In the Irish context, this term refers to a society’s negotiation of a post- conflict equilibrium, in which each faction strives for peaceful co-existence with other groups, rather than seeking a “winner take all” outcome. And generally speaking, this is happening in Northern Ireland. I should note that this idea goes back to Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” that one shouldn’t undertake an action that one would not want to see as a general rule. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s definition of amour-propre adds the thought that every individual shares a need for respect within the community. Harvard University philosopher John Rawls explains in his analysis of Rousseau’s political theory that all The contempt for the “other” that underlies relations between groups involved in sectarian and ethnic conflicts has to be confronted squarely.