Peace Without Consensus: Power Sharing Politics in Northern Ireland by Mary-Alice C Clancy Dr

Author:Mary-Alice C Clancy Dr [Dr, Mary-Alice C Clancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317082781
Google: n7woDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30202699
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Analogies at Peace: Explaining US Intervention in Northern Ireland

As Chapter 3 noted, Lynch (2004: 141) argues that President Clinton’s decision to intervene in Northern Ireland is best captured through realist explanations of international relations. Although the US did not always side with the Irish or support the republican leadership’s demands during the political process, this chapter has made clear that, on balance, the United States’ interventions in the early years of the post-Agreement period tended to support the Irish government’s preferred agendas. Theoretically, Clinton’s post-Agreement interventions can also be explained with reference to realism, as Clinton and his NSC staff yet again bypassed the State Department as its officials were likely to oppose supporting the Irish given the importance of the British to other foreign policy issues like Kosovo. Moreover, British diplomatic power was inadequate to reverse Clinton’s policy (Lynch 2009: 74), a point that becomes all the more apparent when one contrasts the Adams visa decision with Clinton’s refusal to grant a visa to Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui (Branch 2009: 254–6). Indeed, the bulk of Clinton’s interventions in the post-Agreement period appear to lend evidence to a Blair official’s contention that although Downing Street puts a lot of effort into maintaining the ‘special relationship’, sometimes US officials simply do as they please (Coughlin 2006: 11).

Additionally, the Clinton administration’s decision to side with the Irish government on many issues can also be partially attributed to US officials’ tendency to invoke US civil rights and colonial analogies when devising policy for Northern Ireland. As Khong (1992) argues, the use of analogies in foreign policy unfortunately tends to obscure more than it illuminates. In the case of Northern Ireland, equating Northern Ireland’s nationalists to pre-civil rights African Americans overstates the level of discrimination that nationalists experienced and ignores the fact that the conflict in Northern Ireland is primarily ethno-national in nature.8 To compare the RUC to the police of the segregated Deep South (see Branch 2009: 641, Godson 2004: 610–11) similarly obscures the conflict’s roots and paramilitaries’ culpability for the majority of the violence that occurred in Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, much of Clinton’s obstinacy on policing stemmed from his grafting of the US civil rights experience onto Northern Ireland. According to a US official:

I think Americans, official and unofficial, probably bring a lot of baggage to Northern Ireland that they’re only dimly aware of. And that gets in the way, I think, of a clear understanding in Northern Ireland. I think we bring the civil rights movement in our heads, whether we realise it or not. So we’re inclined to be pro-Catholic, because they kind of sound like the civil rights movement. And we’re inclined to be sceptical of the Protestants, especially the DUP, because they sound like Alabama on a bad day. And often we look at Northern Ireland through that lens, and I think that’s a misleading lens to carry with us. You can see that today on the crucial issue of policing (Interview with US source A December 2005).

Clinton

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.