Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
Vol. 9, No. 4, 513–526, December 2006
Towards a Problematisation of the
Problematisations that Reduce Northern
Ireland to a ‘Problem’
NICK VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS
Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK
NickVaughan-Williams
940Taylor
ndv03@aber.ac.uk
00000December
&
Francis
Critical
10.1080/13698230600941978
FCRI_A_194113.sgm
1369-8230
Original
2006
and
Review
Article
(print)/1743-8772
Francis
of2006
International
Ltd
(online)
Social and Political Philosophy
ABSTRACT This essay highlights but then refuses a dominant urge within extant applications of political philosophy to the Troubles: the urge to prescribe ‘solutions’ to ‘the Northern
Irish problem’. The argument presented here is that this urge can be seen as constitutive of
the very problem presumably most analysts seek to overcome. The aim, therefore, is to
explore alternative approaches to representations of conflict drawing on aspects of the work
of William Connolly, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how a deconstructive approach might open up new possibilities for critical intervention
into ‘the Troubles’ in a way that avoids merely reproducing the main fissures of conflict.
KEY WORDS: Northern Ireland, deconstruction, problems, solutions, interventions
Introduction
If all the publications, the explanations, the analyses and the ‘solutions’ to the
[Northern Irish] ‘problem’ were put side by side they would span the entire
circumference of the world. (Arthur 1996: 1)
Despite the volume of literature written on ‘the Troubles’ we still do not know what
‘the problem’ in Northern Ireland is or how it might be ‘solved’. However, as I will
go on to argue, there is a sense in which the constant search for solutions has
become constitutive of the very problem presumably most analysts seek to solve.
This double bind is not neutral or natural but a politically charged logic that reproduces rather than unravels sinews of conflict. My suggestion is that most applications of political philosophy in the context of research on Northern Ireland have
served to reify rather than transcend this bind. We are typically led to believe that
there are ready-made solutions, often (though not exclusively) located within liberal
Correspondence Address: Nick Vaughan-Williams, Department of International Politics, University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3DA. Email: ndv03@aber.ac.uk
ISSN 1369-8230 Print/1743-8772 Online/06/040513-14 © 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13698230600941978
514
N. Vaughan-Williams
thought, for already-given problems between two indefatigably opposed communities. The 1998 Belfast Agreement reflects faith in such logic (see Little 2004: 8).
But, despite the Agreement, it is not at all clear whether the Troubles are finally
over, or if they – whatever ‘they’ are – can easily be reduced to a solvable problem
as such.
From this start a number of questions arise: can analyses of Northern Irish politics
avoid simply reproducing conflict? What alternative approaches might be drawn
upon in order to displace the problem–solution bind? How is it possible to intervene
critically in representations of the Troubles and their legacy so far? Inspired by
David Campbell’s book National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in
Bosnia, this essay explores these questions using aspects of the work of William
Connolly, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The exploration is perhaps best
summed up, to paraphrase Campbell, as a problematisation of the problematisations
that have reduced ‘Northern Ireland’ to a ‘problem’ (Campbell 1998: xi). Here the
Foucauldian concept of problematisation refers to analysis of the implications of the
way in which a group of obstacles or difficulties in any given context get
transformed into problems to which diverse solutions attempt to respond (Foucault
1991b: 389).
The attempt to transform the Troubles into a problem that can be solved is always
highly problematic: conflict gets represented in a way that perpetuates rather than
displaces it. The worry is that the political implications of this problematisation
often go unnoticed. Therefore, rather than using political philosophy to simply reify
contours of conflict, I want to argue; first, there is a need to problematise dominant
problematisations of the ‘Northern Irish problem’; secondly, such a problematisation can be seen precisely as opening up space for critical intervention in the
Northern Irish research context; and, thirdly, a deconstructive ethos allows precisely
for such critical intervention.
This essay is divided into four sections. The first refers to some prominent examples of the way in which ‘Northern Ireland’ is often treated as a ‘problem’ that can
be ‘solved’ by academics and policy-makers. Initially, I cite two articles written by
Shane O’Neill (1996) and Gerard Delanty (1996), which, drawing on John Rawls
and Jurgen Habermas, suggest different solutions to the Troubles. That O’Neill and
Delanty are inspired by Rawls and Habermas is incidental to the development of my
overall argument. I aim to critique the ‘problem-solving’ logic upon which O’Neill
and Delanty draw rather than their specific use of Rawls and Habermas to ‘solve’
the Northern Irish ‘problem’. Moreover, this logic, as I go on to examine, is not
unique to Rawlsian or Habermasian perspectives on conflict in Northern Ireland: it
is implicit in many other discussions, such as those seeking to place the Troubles
within a broader European perspective.
The second section begins by elucidating Foucault’s understanding of problematisation. It goes on to demonstrate how the reduction of ‘Northern Ireland’ to a
‘problem’ for analysts to ‘solve’ can be considered both highly problematic and
ethico-politically charged. Moreover, this problem is shown to be far from peculiar
to modes of analysis of Northern Irish politics but symptomatic of the dominant
Reducing Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem’ 515
modes of enquiry in Western social science more generally (as Edkins (2006) also
observes).
The third section suggests that Foucault’s understanding of problematisation,
Derrida’s ethos of deconstruction, and Connolly’s notion of projectional interpretation offer an alternative register of political interpretation. Crucially, this is a register that opens up new possibilities for thinking about conflict in Northern Ireland. It
is defined by its projectional character in that it seeks to project rather than side-step
the implications of different starting points into its analysis.
The fourth section, focusing most explicitly on Derrida, investigates new ways of
approaching Northern Irish politics that displace rather than re-appropriate the
‘problem–solution’ bind. A deconstructive ethos is shown to thaw frozen identities,
question commonplace starting points and assumptions, and recover the possibility
of thinking politically. On this basis, I demonstrate how such an ethos might intervene critically in representations of the Troubles, why such a critical intervention
might be important, and what the ramifications for future scholarship might be.
Problematisations of the Northern Irish ‘Problem’
The tendency to reduce Northern Ireland to a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ is found
in much academic and policy-oriented writings on the Troubles. An exemplary
instance of this is Shane O’Neill’s article ‘The idea of an over-lapping consensus in
Northern Ireland: stretching the limits of liberalism’ (1996). In this piece O’Neill
modifies the work of John Rawls in order to prescribe a range of solutions culminating in a ‘just’ constitutional settlement. For O’Neill, the main benefit of a Rawlsian
perspective is that it would ‘stimulate among all groups of citizens in Northern
Ireland the kind of rational reflection on their own political situation that would
allow them to listen effectively to the views of other groups’ (O’Neill 1996: 91,
emphasis added). Underlying this perspective is the notion that dialogue is necessary for a consensus to emerge ‘among groups of citizens in ways that involve the
revision of their deepest political aspirations’ (O’Neill 1996: 97–98, emphasis
added).
O’Neill’s argument chimes with Gerard Delanty’s in his article ‘Habermas and
post-national identity: theoretical perspectives on the conflict’ (1996). In search of a
solution to the Troubles Delanty draws on Habermas to suggest that what is needed
is ‘a model of civil society in which autonomous public spheres can emerge and
provide a forum for conflict mediation’ (Delanty 1996: 29, emphasis added). Interestingly, whilst the Belfast Agreement might not quote Rawls or Habermas directly,
it does share a common vocabulary with O’Neill and Delanty in terms of a commitment to principles of ‘tolerance’, ‘dialogue’, ‘resolution of difference’, ‘consensus’,
‘agreement’, and ‘justice’ in its vision for the whole ‘community’. This discourse,
as Adrian Little points out, ‘bears the clear imprints of contemporary developments
in liberal democratic thought’ (Little 2004: 8).
On the one hand, it could be argued that the implementation of the Belfast Agreement demonstrates not only the applicability but also the utility of liberal thought
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(broadly conceived) in the Northern Irish peace process. On the other hand,
however, we still cannot say with any degree of certainty that the Troubles are over
as a result of the Agreement itself. Indeed, as Rick Wilford and Robin Wilson note,
there have been more shootings, beatings and injuries (though not deaths) linked
with paramilitary violence in the period from 1998 to Easter 2003 than in the same
five-year period between 1993 and1998 (Wilford & Wilson 2003: 8). In other
words, it is not necessarily the case that, for all the rhetoric of ‘justice’ and ‘consensus’, liberal thought has actually ‘solved’ anything but rather perpetuated the
‘problem’ it projects into its own analysis, understanding, and representation of
‘Northern Ireland’.
In response to O’Neill, Delanty and the framing of the Belfast Agreement, a
recent wave of critical scholarship has questioned the attempt to apply liberal political thought to try to solve the Northern Irish problem. Arthur Aughey (1997, 1998),
Alan Finlayson (1997), and Adrian Little (2003, 2004), among others, have pointed
to the limits of the liberal paradigm by tapping into a much wider range of political
philosophy including the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Carl
Schmitt. For example in his article ‘The problems of antagonism’ (2003), Little
rejects Rawls and Habermas primarily on account of their practical inapplicability
given what he perceives to be the peculiarities of the Northern Irish situation.
According to Little, the solutions offered by these liberal theorists are ‘pipe-dreams’
since ‘the magic wand of liberalism cannot eradicate the deep-seated, heart-felt
beliefs and sources of ethnic, religious, and national identity’ (Little 2003: 383).
Thus, despite the optimism associated with 1998, Little claims that the Belfast
Agreement is more like a temporary elastic bandage over a deep wound than
permanent multi-level suturing.
However, the extent to which Rawls, Habermas or indeed any other thinker associated with ‘liberal democratic thought’ assists our understanding of conflict in
Northern Ireland is extraneous to the central concern of this essay.1 I am not interested in engaging with the specifics of the Rawlsian or Habermasian perspectives so
much as the way in which writers like O’Neill and Delanty use these perspectives
according to a ‘problem-solving’ logic. Moreover, whilst there is no gainsaying that
many attempts to ‘solve’ the Northern Irish ‘problem’ are derived from liberal
democratic thought, the use of a ‘problem-solving’ logic can be found in many
different contexts. It is this ‘problem-solving’ logic rather than liberalism that is the
target of my critical investigation.2
Another example of the use of ‘problem-solving’ logic can be found in much of
the work that sets Northern Irish politics against the backdrop of European integration. Employing a neo-functionalist inspired logic, it is often argued that economic
‘spill-over’ offers yet another solution to the Northern Irish problem. This logic
underpins the INTERREG programmes, which, in conjunction with the Support
Programme for Peace and Reconciliation (SPPR), have made the EU financially
responsible for cross-border rail, road and energy links, industrial, agricultural, urban
and rural regeneration in border areas, and all-Ireland tourism development
(Anderson 1999: 691). Some authors, accepting that ‘economic considerations, …
Reducing Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem’ 517
political adjustments, … and conceptual change’ have ‘facilitated the conceptualisation of a common Irish space’, imply that the EU has been and will continue to be a
good thing for the Troubles (Hayward 2004). On the basis of a re-conceptualised
common Irish space, ‘the language and conversations of EU policy-making’ are said
to have ‘helped … contending parties to talk about solutions to old problems in a new
way’ (Meehan 2000: 96). Again, whilst many writers are sceptical about the impact
of European integration on the trajectory of Northern Irish politics (Kennedy 1994),
my aim here is to merely highlight the way in which a ‘problem-solving’ logic can
be said to underpin recent literature on the relationship between the EU and the Troubles. Such a logic perpetually (re)produces ‘Northern Ireland’ as a problem to be
solved, which, as the next section goes on to demonstrate, is itself highly problematic.
Problematising Problematisations of the Northern Irish ‘Problem’
Little (2003, 2004) has called for a fundamental re-thinking of the role that political
philosophy might play in the context of research on Northern Irish politics. And so it
is in this vein that the following discussion ensues. Having established the importance of a ‘problem-solving’ logic in a variety of perspectives the Troubles, I now
want to move on to consider what is at stake in the general urge to prescribe
‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ in the first place.
Foucault emphasises how a given solution to a given problem is only ever
constructed according to how the problem is perceived in the first place. This ‘work
of thought’ is precisely what Foucault calls ‘problematisation’ (Foucault 1991b:
389). Foucault highlights the political implications of the activity of defining any
problem as a problem (an activity Finlayson refers to in his paper as ‘problemsetting’). In the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the problem is not as
straightforward as some mainstream accounts imply. Typically, ‘the Northern Irish
problem’ is framed in terms of the clash of religions (i.e. ‘Protestants’ versus
‘Catholics’ – see for example Kennedy-Pipe 1997: 21) or nationalisms (i.e. ‘unionists or ‘loyalists’ in favour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland versus ‘nationalists’ or ‘republicans’ in favour of an Irish Republic on the whole of the island of
Ireland – see for example Hughes 1994: xiii). According to this interpretive model,
otherwise known as ‘two communities thesis’, conflict was always waiting to
happen. Yet, as more and more scholarship is inclined to admit, this problematisation requires critical interrogation.
The framing of the whole of Irish history in terms of the existence of two intransigent communities or traditions destined never to live together peacefully is deeply
problematic. This narrative, in providing a centre according to which the Troubles
over the last 30 or so years may be emplaced, given meaning and understood, foists
upon the past a coherence or shapeliness that is absent from the way in which events
present themselves. This is not to deny the salience of terms such as ‘Protestant’,
‘Catholic’, ‘unionist’, ‘loyalist’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘republican’. But it does call into
question the way in which most discourses tend to take the existence of ‘two
communities’ as some sort of self-evident truth.
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Such tendencies rely upon monochrome notions of identity instead of taking on
board overlapping, confused or even contradictory identities, which, eschewed in
favour of conceptual simplicity, can be said to slice through the alleged fault lines of
conflict between one coherent group and another. It can be claimed that there are
deep antagonisms in Northern Ireland between parties competing within nationalism
and within unionism. The fantasy of coherence simplifies dynamic matrices of
diversity and, consequently, delimits the range of possible ways of dealing or coping
with conflict.
By relying too heavily on solutions that diagnose the problem of Northern Ireland
as a problem between two communities, the concern is that we end up recycling
rather than displacing this constant search for a solution. On this basis, the challenge
is to draw on a wider variety of political philosophy than has hitherto been
employed in discussions of Northern Irish politics in order to try to break this bind.
With this in mind, I want to suggest that aspects of the work of Connolly, Derrida
and Foucault offer an alternative register of political interpretation that opens up
new possibilities for thinking about conflict in Northern Ireland: one that crucially
projects rather than effaces the ethico-political implications of particular starting
points for its analysis.
‘Projectional Interpretation’
All political interpretation invokes a particular social ontology. In this sense, as
Connolly points out, political interpretation is ‘onto-political’ because it ‘contains
fundamental presumptions that establish the possibility within which its assessment
of actuality is presented’ (Connolly 1992: 119). Many analyses of Northern Ireland,
especially those attempting to apply political philosophy to solve the conflict, allow
fundamental presumptions to go unnoticed. For example, as we have already seen,
O’Neill and Delanty argue that ‘rational reflection’ (O’Neill 1996: 91) among
citizens leads to ‘autonomous spheres of conflict mediation’ (Delanty 1996: 29).
This argument feigns a certain neutrality in its quest to solve the Northern Irish
problem. And yet neither O’Neill nor Delanty reflect on the way in which their
argument relies upon the fundamental presumption that consensus is some sort of
transcendental standard immune from criticism. Such a model, for Connolly, is troublesome since it privileges a disengaged form of subjectivity which, crucially in the
case of Northern Ireland, is idealised, de-historicised and detached from relations of
antagonistic interaction (Connolly 1992: 130–140).
The tendency to elide the onto-politics of political interpretation is not peculiar to
analyses of Northern Ireland. Rather, as Edkins (2006) also points out, it is symptomatic of a broader lack of recognition within social science that where we start
dictates where we end up. This tendency stands in radical contrast to both Foucauldian problematisation and Derridean deconstruction as examples of what Connolly
refers to as post-Nietzschean ‘projectional interpretation’ (Connoly 1992: 146).
There is often a reluctance to mention Foucault and Derrida in the same breath.
This is a lingering consequence of their somewhat acrimonious exchange in the late
Reducing Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem’ 519
1960s/early 1970s on Descartes and madness (see Foucault 2000, 2003; Derrida
2002b). Since this dispute, neither Foucault nor Derrida engaged substantively with
each other’s work. Indeed, as late as 1984, Foucault insisted that any ‘confusion’
between problematisation and deconstruction would be ‘unwise’ (Foucault 1991b:
389). However, it can be argued that there is no contradiction in drawing on both
approaches despite this warning. Notwithstanding Foucault’s comment above, problematisation and deconstruction both involve detailed engagement with the whispered priorities, assumptions, and exclusions implied in any given interpretation.
The distinguishing feature of these approaches, according to Connolly, is that they
‘proceed by projecting these presumptions explicitly into detailed interpretations of
actuality, acknowledging that its implicit projections surely exceed its implicit
formulation of them and that its explicit formulation … always exceeds its current
capacity to demonstrate its truth’ (Connolly 1992: 145, emphasis added). Here, it
must be noted, the projectional quality of both Foucault and Derrida is of paramount
importance.
As Connolly suggests, and as Campbell’s book National Deconstruction demonstrates, problematisation and deconstruction entail a research logic that is radically
different from conventional approaches. Traditional political analyses presuppose
the possibility of being able to explain what something means or why something it
what it is in social reality. Yet Derrida’s much quoted but often misunderstood
comment ‘Il n’ y a pas de hors-texte’ (Derrida 1976: 158) translated as ‘there is nothing outside context’ (Derrida 1988: 136) questions whether there is such a thing as
social reality beyond different discursive representations of how that social reality is
perceived. Importantly, his approach does not preclude the distinction between
linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. Rather, as Campbell neatly puts it, ‘it’s just
that there is no way of bringing into being and comprehending non-linguistic
phenomena except through discursive practices’ (Campbell 1998: 25). On this basis,
the aim of research becomes to show ‘how something is what it is’ rather than ‘why
it is what it is’ (Campbell 1998: 5). Our attention is diverted away from the search for
a cause or ultimate problem needing to be solved – the established modus operandi
of dominant forms of social and political science – towards an analysis of the creation
and political implications of different representations in any given empirical context.
Consequently, the role of the researcher working on Northern Ireland, to paraphrase Campbell, is not merely to prescribe solutions whose logic is already implicated in the context of the Troubles but rather to think outside of the various
political discourses through which Northern Ireland – or competing Northern
Irelands – come to be (Campbell 1998: ix, 15). Moreover, such an approach implies
a certain degree of intellectual humility largely absent in extant theoretical discussions of Northern Ireland. The suggestion here is that researchers should resist the
temptation to attempt to convince people they hold the (non-existent) magic key to a
peaceful future. Inevitably this raises the question: What might researchers drawing
upon projectional modes of political interpretation to analyse the Troubles actually
do? The next section, focusing on Derridean deconstruction, aims to explore this
question.
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Critical Interventions
Philosophy is charged with the task of defining concepts. In order to do so it draws
borders. For Derrida, the drawing of such borders is as much about exclusion as
identification: in other words, what is left out is just as important as what is left in.
As Giovanni Borradori points out, the implications of this double function can be
significant or trivial according to the singularity of any given context (Borradori
2003: 145). Traditional Western philosophy, in its search for certainty, truth and
unequivocal knowledge, often underestimates the contingency of these drawn
borders. Derridean philosophy, by contrast, exposes this contingency, explores
traces of that which totalising discourses exclude, and uses these traces to de-totalise these totalities by setting them against their internal differentiation (Borradori
2003: 146).
Many critics of deconstruction suggest that it is somehow removed from
peoples’ lives. The assumption, more often than not, is that deconstructive
approaches offer little analytical purchase against empirical backdrops. Hence, in
Re-thinking Northern Ireland, David Miller argues that ‘the high unintelligibility
factor of much left-bank theory’ renders its ‘desirability … less than compelling’
(Miller 1998: 35). However, contra Miller, deconstruction is not a ‘theory’ (Derrida 1990: 85). Neither is it a philosophy nor a method that can be applied to any
given context as such (Derrida 1990: 85; 1995: 174; 1996: 217). It is not even ‘a
discourse, an act, or a practice’ (Derrida 1990: 85). Rather, Derrida insists,
‘deconstruction, if there be such a thing, happens; it is what happens’ (Derrida
2001: 20). Elsewhere he comments: ‘deconstruction is the case’ (Derrida 1990:
85). In other words, no matter how much something appears naturally sewn up,
settled, or given, it is always produced in a limitless context of interpretation and
re-interpretation, which, necessarily, denies the possibility of any sort of closure,
finitude or totalisation.
A deconstructive ethos leads to ‘extreme complication’ (Derrida 1988: 128) of
precise distinctions or borders of concepts upon which coherent, logical and explanatory accounts of fundamentally imprecise phenomena are necessarily predicated. It
must be emphasised, however, that to complicate in this manner is not to fetishise
complication for the sake of obscurity. Instead, deconstruction refuses the urge,
reflected in conventional modes of interpretation, to simplify or to pretend that there
is simplicity where there is none. To deconstruct is to proceed on the basis that, as
Derrida puts it, ‘if things were simple, word would have gotten round’ (Derrida
1988: 119).
On this basis, paradoxically, deconstruction resists theory: it is a sort of thinking
as resistance against ‘an organised network of theorems, laws, rules, and methods’
(Derrida 1990: 85–86) in favour of openness to infinite context, recognition of
contingency, and sensitivity to the inherent perilousness of that which appears stable
and settled. It consists of ‘dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting
“out of joint” the authority of the “is”’ (Derrida 1995: 25). Precisely in this way,
Derrida emphasises, deconstruction ‘intervenes’ critically (Derrida 1981: 93).
Reducing Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem’ 521
It is easy to see how deconstruction – with its implied dislocation, displacement,
disarticulation, disjoining and ‘putting out of joint’ – might be considered somehow
negative in the somewhat tempestuous political climate of Northern Ireland.
However, for Derrida, a deconstructive ethos is an inherently affirmative gesture.
Deconstruction represents, to quote Connolly, ‘an attempt to thaw perspectives
frozen within a past way of life, to offer alternative accounts of threats to difference
created by the dogmatism of established identities, and to advance different
accounts of dangers and possibilities crowded out by established regimes of
thought’ (Connolly 1992: 140). The problematisation of the Troubles as a problem
between two communities that might be solved is precisely the sort of frozen regime
of thought that is in desperate need of thawing. Instead of prescribing solutions that
presuppose the possibility of ever actually knowing what ‘the Northern Irish problem’ is, the challenge is to offer alternative conceptualisations of Northern Irish
politics which, dissatisfied with the hitherto complicity of academic analyses in the
reproduction of the dominant contours of conflict, create conditions for thinking
otherwise.
Perhaps a deconstructive reading of Northern Ireland might start with a critique of
the way in which the Belfast Agreement tends to act as the starting point for most
discussions of the Troubles. This point of departure is encouraged by the text of the
Agreement itself, which claims to mark a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning. However, we might ask: What are the political implications of beginning our
analyses with the Agreement, the institutions it inaugurated, and the mindset it has
produced? What are the starting points of the Agreement itself, which, when taken
uncritically as a starting point for wider analysis of Northern Irish politics, often get
elided?
The discourse of ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ seems to relate to nothing other than
the harmless urge to plot events in some sort of chronological order. This is a well
worn discourse in the trajectory of the Troubles and one which, given the recent
intensification of efforts to restore devolution, is ubiquitous in the media at present.
For example, according to one television reporter, ‘the prospect of Paisley as First
Minister together with McGuiness as Second Minister could bring about the end of
the long war and the beginning of a new era within forty-eight hours from now’
(ITN News at Ten Report, 6 December 2004). Yet, as R.B.J. Walker has pointed
out, the difficulty with this discourse in general ‘arises from the extent to which
accounts of … ‘new beginnings’ … have come to be framed within historically
specific accounts of what it means to begin [or] to end’ (Walker 1995: 310).
References to ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ presuppose a sovereign voice telling us
where it is we are now, whoever ‘we’ and whenever ‘now’ might be. However, such
a sovereign voice, one that has also tended to depict the Troubles as an immutable
conflict between two communities destined to live apart, is inherently more uncertain that the certainty of its tone suggests: its authority can only ever derive from its
own authorisation. Thus, to invoke or to remain uncritical of the discourse of beginnings and endings is to legitimise the very authority it rests upon. If we are to think
outside of the dominant political discourses through which representation, conduct,
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and attempted resolution of the Northern Irish Troubles have come to be, it is
necessary to resist this type of legitimisation in the first place.
Deconstruction offers a rigorous critique of the way in which forms of authority
get legitimised in mystery. In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida draws on Walter Benjamin’s
essay ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate how the authority of the law
rests upon two extra-legal and inter-related forms of violence. The first type of
violence is referred to as ‘founding’ or ‘law-making’ violence. This can be seen as
the revolutionary moment when the authority behind the law establishes itself by a
‘pure performative act that does not have to answer to or before anyone’ (Derrida
1992: 36). The second type of violence is referred to as ‘secondary’ or ‘law-preserving violence’. This works to secure founding violence in order to conserve, maintain, and insure the ‘permanence and enforceability of law’ (Derrida 1992: 31).
Ultimately, for Derrida, the two forms of violence are never entirely distinct leading
to a ‘structure of fundamental violence’ in which founding/law-making violence and
secondary/law-preserving violence are always in some sense blurred.
Derrida’s argument highlights the precariousness of what otherwise appears
settled. Since the origin of the authority behind the law cannot rest upon anything
but its own authorisation (there is no anterior authority to authorise it), Derrida
understands this authority as a violence without a ground: something that is beyond
the conventional opposition between legal and illegal. Derrida calls the moments
when the authority behind the law attempts to authorise its own authority the
épokhè: a Greek word meaning ‘pause’ (Derrida 1992: 36). These moments, supposing that they might be isolated, are ‘terrifying moments’ because of the ‘sufferings,
the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them’ (Derrida 1992: 36).
Derrida argues that, no matter how distant it may feel, ‘the foundation of all states
occurs in a situation we can call revolutionary’ (Derrida 1993: 36). For each revolution to be successful in the founding of a new authority behind law it is necessary for
that authority to create ‘après coup what it was destined in advance to produce,
namely, proper interpretive models to give sense [and] legitimacy to the violence it
has produced’ (Derrida 1992: 36). Elsewhere he claims: ‘successful unifications or
foundations only ever succeed in making one forget that there never was a natural
unity or a prior foundation’ (Derrida 2002a: 115, emphasis added). These interpretive models and imperatives to forget constitute what Derrida calls a ‘discourse of
self-legitimation’. The justification for the violent origins of the foundation of
authority in every state can only ever be justified belatedly (Derrida 2002a: 115). As
Derrida points out, one only has to look at revolutionary situations with their accompanying discourses throughout the twentieth century in order to get a sense for the
way in which the recourse to violence is always justified ‘by alleging the founding,
in progress or to come, of a new law’ (Derrida 1992: 35).
A deconstructive ethos, therefore, calls for attention to be given to structures of
fundamental violence created and sustained by performative acts of foundation so
that the unstable limits between force and violence are constantly probed. This questioning of foundations is neither foundationalist nor anti-foundationalist. Rather, it
urges a teasing out of the way in which all foundations are less stable than we are
Reducing Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem’ 523
often led to believe. Furthermore, such questioning is not restricted to theoretical
discourse. On the contrary, as Derrida says explicitly, to deconstruct is to ‘aspire to
something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and
responsible (though always, of course, in a mediated) way, not only in the
profession but in what one calls the city, the polis, and more generally the world
(Derrida 1992: 8–9).
Derrida’s over-arching argument presented in ‘Force of Law’ has significant
implications for any critical intervention in, or representation of, conflict in Northern Ireland. Derrida enjoins us to think much further back in our analysis of the
Troubles in Northern Ireland – certainly well before the Belfast Agreement – to the
demarcation of the border on the island of Ireland. On the one hand, this international border, currently separating the juridico-political spaces of the Republic of
Ireland from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, may appear
increasingly insignificant. On the other hand, however, as Malcolm Anderson and
Paddy Bort emphasise, ‘the border is deeply etched in the political culture of the
population … a crucial political instrument in the hands of the authorities in both
halves of the island’ (Anderson & Bort 1999: 15). Using Derrida it is possible to see
how the border might act as a conceptual site around which alternative thought and
practice might emerge.
Following Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ argument, the inscription of the borders of
any juridical-political entity, such as ‘Northern Ireland’, may be interpreted as the
épokhè written in space. Borders mark the violent foundations of that entity: they
are produced by and enclose the violence of the founding authority behind the law.
But to remember the épokhè is to remember the inherent deconstructibility of the
present: the fact that once things were not the way they are now. In this way, the
memory of the épokhè is revolutionary. Borders may serve to uphold the status quo
but, and this is the paradox, borders are also a reminder of the ability to challenge
authority, enact change, and act politically. There is a locus of possibility – something of the nature of the perhaps – at the heart of borders. To recognise this locus of
possibility in the Irish border is to remember the possibility of politics and the
potential for different forms of political arrangements to come. Here, it must be
emphasised, the intention is not merely to propose new measures within an already
existing frame: rather, it is to re-think the inherited frames within which Northern
Irish politics have been hitherto analysed.
This argument does not favour any ‘side’ as conventionally understood in the context
of the Troubles. However, it resists the rhetorical urge, as Finlayson (2006) puts it, to
tread a delicate via media between sides. Such a balanced approach, in keeping with
the ‘parity of esteem’ principle, merely brings into being, legitimises, and concretises,
the very fissures of conflict it presumably wants to overcome. A deconstructive
approach, by contrast, intervenes by resisting, questioning, and challenging the
dogmatism of established identities and frozen regimes of thought represented by the
understanding of the Troubles in terms of competing ‘sides’ in the first place.
Furthermore, whereas dominant approaches pursue consensus between alreadygiven ‘sides’, deconstruction denies that this is always a value to be privileged over
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any other. The worry is that, as Little explains in greater depth elsewhere, the
attempt to obtain rational, impartial, agreement represents an emaciation of the
political: it amounts to a constant deferral of antagonisms as reflected in the trajectory of the peace process (Little 2004: 195). In this sense, Derridean deconstruction
shares the Foucauldian axiom: ‘one must not be for consensuality but one must not
be against non-consensuality’ (Foucault 1991a: 379). The aim is not to privilege one
side over the other, or to privilege a reading of the conflict that is even framed in
terms of sides, but rather to privilege the possibility of politics: in other words, to aid
and abet the creation of openings for ethico-political interventions whilst simultaneously resisting competing forms of totalisation and de-politicisation at all costs.
Conclusions
This essay has chiefly concerned itself with the implications of the ways in which
we think about the Troubles. Conventionally, political philosophy has been applied
in order to try to ‘solve’ the Northern Irish ‘problem’. A recent wave of critical
scholarship, drawing on Schmitt and Laclau and Mouffe, has challenged the use of
specifically liberal political philosophy in the study of Northern Irish politics on
account of its practical inapplicability and normative undesirability (Aughey 1997,
1998; Finlayson 1997; Little 2003, 2004). However, it could also be argued that the
more general urge to prescribe solutions is itself inherently problematic: it implies
we can say what the ‘problem’ is in any given context in the first place.
Typically, the Northern Irish problem has been framed, both inside and outside
academia, in terms of the ‘two communities’ thesis. Yet this problematisation, I have
argued, requires critical interrogation. The operating assumptions of the resulting
solutions, such as those offered by O’Neill and Delanty, go largely unexamined even
though they are idealised, de-historicised, and detached from relations of antagonistic
interaction. This approach stands in radical contrast with what Connolly refers to as
forms of post-Nietzschean ‘projectional interpretation’, which project rather than
efface operating assumptions directly into their analyses of politics.
Though not a method, theory or even a philosophy, Derridean deconstruction
exemplifies this form of projectional interpretation. As demonstrated in the final
section of the discussion, a deconstructive approach, contrary to those who see no
role for so-called ‘left-bank theory’ (Miller 1998: 35), opens up new possibilities for
critical intervention in analyses of conflict in Northern Ireland. Such an intervention
aims to thaw frozen identities such as those upon which the ‘two communities’
thesis is predicated; question the assumptions and their implications of commonplace starting points such as the Belfast Agreement; and recover the possibility of
thinking politically. Moreover, a particularly symbolic site around which this
alternative means of representing the conflict might emerge is the international
border on the island of Ireland itself.
The concepts, theories and logics used to represent the conflict in academia play
an important role in the constitution of the political life they study. Therefore,
changes in these concepts, theories and logics potentially effect wider changes.
Reducing Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem’ 525
Following Connolly, it is possible to see how thinking Northern Ireland differently
engages in a radical praxis that re-orientates the received wisdom about what it
might mean to act politically: ‘conceptual revision is … indispensable to significant
political change. It is part of that process by which events once considered mere
facts come to be seen as the outcome of a political process and thereby as properly
subject to public debate’ (Connolly 1993: 203).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Institute of Governance at Queen’s University Belfast for
hosting the workshop; John Barry, Marysia Zalewski, Cian O’Driscoll and the
Editor of CRISPP for valuable comments on earlier versions of the essay; and David
and Dorothy McMillan for their hospitality in Belfast.
Notes
1.
2.
I have written elsewhere on the limitations of approaches based on Habermasian discourse ethics; see
Vaughan-Williams (2005)
Readers seeking a definition and/or sustained engagement with ‘the liberal paradigm’ in Northern
Irish politics are best pointed in the direction of Little (2004).
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