The Limits of Politics: Reflections on a Damaged Peace
John D Brewer*
.2014 Annual Dunleath Lecture
Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education
Abstract
This lecture introduces a new conceptualisation of peace processes, which emphasises the importance of civil society over politics and social transformation over political transformation, which is then applied to Northern Ireland to reflect critically on the damaged aspects of peace in Northern Irish society. This provides context to the argument that civil society needs to take back control of the peace process from politicians and address not only the political problems that beset it, but primarily the moral vacuum within which peace is approached in Northern Ireland. It is only with this moral renewal of peace as a vocation that tolerance, compromise, and a shared society are achievable.
I would like to thank the Council and Queen’s University for the honour of delivering this year’s Annual Dunleath Lecture, and to thank you all for coming this evening. I stand as the latest in a line of very distinguished speakers and I am fully aware of the privilege the
Council has bestowed on me. I hope I can do justice to the essential idea of the Dunleath
Lecture, which is to provoke public debate about the development of a shared society in
Northern Ireland.
*Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social
Justic e at Queen’s University. He runs the £1.26m Leverhulme Trust-funded Compromise after
Conflict research programme in the Institute, which focuses on victims in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and South Africa, and has a special interest in religious peacebuilding. He is a Member of the Royal
Irish Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Academician in the Academy of Social
Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was President of the British Sociological
Association and is now Honorary Life Vice President. He is a member of the United Nations Roster of
Global Experts for his work on peace processes and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Social
Science from Brunel University for services to social science and to the study of peace processes. He is author or co-author of 15 books and editor or co-editor of a further three. In 2013 he gave the
Annual Academy of Social Science Lecture in London and in April gives the Third Annual Lord Patten
Lecture on Social Renewal at Newcastle-on-Tyne. In May he is participating in one of the
Westminster Faith Debates defending the motion that religion can play a positive role in peacebuilding.
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Let me begin with the single point I wish to make tonight – and one point I think is enough when it is rather complicated and controversial : Northern Ireland’s peace process is too important to be left to politicians; civil society needs to take back control of the peace process and address not only the political problems that beset it, but the moral vacuum within which peace is approached, for it is only with the moral renewal of peace as a vocation that a shared society is achievable.
To suggest there are limits to politics is absurd when everything, to the post-modern mind at least, is political. It may seem even more dangerous for a sociologist to be seen stepping on the toes of political scientists and passing judgement on things perceived to be outside the d iscipline’s remit. However, it is precisely because I am a sociologist that I am aware of the limits of politics.
Ours is an era in which the distinction between public and private space has collapsed to make everything public, broadening the scope and penetration of politics. There is hardly anything anymore that is private. The public sphere is now replete with behaviours once kept private – politicians’ displays of drunkenness, promiscuity or emotion come to mind.
Likewise, the private sphere is penetrated by politics to the point now where politicians determine some of our most intimate decisions, such as whom one can marry and where, if it’s of the same gender, and whether one can donate blood, or organs. Politicians’ private behaviour is public spectacle, and people’s privacy is open to public gaze through many forms of surveillance. In all these ways, the personal is now political, and politics is no longer confined to the public sphere.
But this suits my argument rather than defeats it. If, indeed, everything is political, politics is no longer a demarcated specialist domain that takes place in institutions occupied by professional politicians, to whom the public defer responsibility for decision-making, and in
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which they intervene only during elections. That everything is political only highlights the decline of politics.
There are further reasons why some things are simply too important to be left to professional politicians. For one thing, the discourse of formal politics is inimical to the sensible discussion of certain sorts of issues. Professional politics is focused on the here-and-now.
‘The vision thing’, as George W Bush once disparagingly put it, is difficult for professional politicians, for the ‘long term’ tends to mean to them only the next election. They tend not to share the interest I have in what the future is like for my young grandchildren.
Professional political discourse is also adversarial, dominated by point scoring, which Norn
Iron-speak has wonderfully rendered into the term ‘whataboutery’. This tends to mean that politicians eschew discussion of complex issues that do not accord to party lines or which do not permit stark black and white policy responses. Professional politics does not cope well with complexity, and as moral and ethical issues tend by nature to be complex, professional politics tends to be instrumental not value oriented. Politicians think about what will win them the next election, not about what is right – or, at most, they claim the two are equivalent. But when values are reduced to votes like this, so that what politicians believe in as a value orientation is merely what will win them elections, we have good reason to claim there are limits to politics.
If I may come now to my central argument, I contend that peace, tolerant co-existence and a vision for a shared society are examples of issues too important to be left solely to the responsibility of politicians. They are the responsibility of all of us, and all of us have a right to debate them and a stake in achieving them.
However, I have to complicate this argument slightly, as sociologists are wont to do. Three critical distinctions define my conceptual map of the sociology of peace processes. The first
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is between active and passive peacemaking. The former lives out commitments to peace as a social practice, so that peacemaking is enacted as a vocation rather than just talked about; passive peacemaking is full of idealistic commitment, but lacks application. Many governments, organisations and people talk peace aplenty but are passive when it comes to putting it into practice.
To fleshout the forms that active peacemaking can take, we can utilise Johan Galtung’s famous contrast between negative and positive peace. Galtung is the founder of the discipline of Peace Studies and negative peace means working to end violence; positive peace involves working toward establishing wider principles of justice, equality, fairness and social redistribution. Because most people cannot understand how something so like mothers and apple pie as peace can be described as ‘negative’, I use other terms. I call negative peace conflict transformation, positive peace, social transformation. The point though is that some peace-builders can be active when it comes to resolving particular incidents of violence, in demanding military groups desist from killing, and dialoguing with them to this end. It is a smaller number who advocate and mobilise to achieve social transformation.
Quite often parties to a conflict can disagree over what they want from a peace process in terms of conflict versus social transformation – is it a permanent truce or wider structural change? Some merely want the killings to stop and do not want to address the structural problems that provoked the killings in the first place.
The final distinction is between the social and political peace processes. This antinomy needs more elaborate explanation. All too often peace processes are understood to describe the negotiation process that results in a settlement and the monitoring of conformity to the accord afterwards. Negotiated compromise peace deals, in which parties opt for (or are
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forced by third parties to accept) second-best preferences in order to resolve conflict, are the foundation of peace processes. I refer to this as the political peace process.
I describe it as political because it involves management of the political system and statebuilding. It includes the establishment of new forms of politically representative institutions, fairer systems of voting, the introduction of human rights law and associated accountability mechanisms, the introduction of a free press, and the creation of procedures by which international observers monitor the accord.
However, the negotiated settlement is never the end of peacemaking, for accords mostly leave unresolved the processes for realising social healing. This is what I refer to as the social peace process, by which I mean reconciliation between erstwhile protagonists, social relationship-building across a communal divide, civil society repair, and replacement of brokenness by the development of tolerance and compromise. The sorts of actions that focus the social peace process include truth and reconciliation procedures, forgiveness and atonement strategies, policies that facilitate and encourage public tolerance and compromise, new forms of memory work, memorialisation and remembering, public apologies, attention to cultural symbols, such as national flags, anthems and the like, and the reassessment and re-evaluation of identity.
The problem is that societal healing is either ignored by negotiators in the political peace process or assumed to follow naturally from the signing of the agreement itself. I think it a rather naïve assumption that once you sort out problematic politics, societal healing occurs effortlessly.
If we focus attention on the political peace process, the domain for its operation and implementation is naturally political. Peace processes become the responsibility of governments, and the political actors that make up, or aspire to be, governments. Political
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actors negotiate the settlements, they occupy the new governance structures and oversee the new institutions, and they either endorse or collapse them, making political decisions about whether to abrogate or stick with the new political arrangements. In this view, peace processes are political affairs, commanded over by politicians, the future success of which is the responsibility of politicians.
However, once we recognise there is also a social peace process, a need for healing within society, peace processes become the responsibility of people who live in societies emerging out of conflict, and the domain in which they function, and are consolidated, widens to include civil society. Social peace becomes my responsibility and yours; it is everyone’s, not just the politicians.
I want to labour this point by making one last conceptual observation. The relationship between these two kinds of peace process is symbiotic. Advances in the political peace process are necessary to open up the space for developments in the social peace process; societal healing first needs there to be conflict transformation through the ending of killings.
But it is also the case that failure to progress in the social peace process can destabilise the gains made in politics. Failure to realise societal healing through the development of tolerance and compromise, weakens the governance structures and makes the institutional reforms fragile by keeping the old divisions ongoing and alive.
It follows therefore that it is in everybody’s interest to make progress in dealing with the social peace process. This includes even the politicians who occupy the new political landscape. Societal healing cannot be ignored at the expense of statebuilding, for the institutions of the state will collapse unless compromise, tolerance and healing in society are also addressed. I am not convinced politicians recognise this; and this is why I refer to the limits of politics.
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You will have noticed to this point that I have not once mentioned Northern Ireland’s peace process. But there are implicit in my argument reasons why I believe it to be a damaged peace. Let me now spell this out clearly.
The Northern Irish peace process has lost its energy and positive momentum – the enthusiasm evident at the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the referendum has diminished or been lost. This is because the political peace process took precedence over the social peace process, ensuring there has been very little progress in healing within society, to the point where the abject failure in social transformation is now destabilising the political gains.
This loss of momentum is reflected, amongst other things, in public bickering over the meaning of the terms of the initial peace settlement, the growth of anti-agreement sentiment amongst its opponents, frustration and desperation amongst its supporters at the lack of progress, and slowness, hesitancy and dissimulation amongst those responsible for making the agreement work.
This has allowed anti-agreement forces – Republican, Unionist and Loyalist – to grow by using a series of legacy issues that should now have been dealt with, such as truth recovery, victim issues and the past, as the means to mobilise anti-agreement sentiment.
The importance of these particular issues is not coincidental. They reflect contestation over the morality of the conflict, whether or not it was justified, and for what purpose. With the political arrangements bedding in, even if not wholly successful, contestation has focused on the morality of the violence. The emblematic terms through this moral contestation is being currently expressed are phrases like ‘innocent victims’, ‘truth recovery’, and ‘accountability for past atrocities ’.
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Permit me three observations here. First, this is a debate about the legacy of the past, not about what a peaceful, shared future might look like. The past has become the arbiter of the future. We argue about the morality of the conflict, not about the moral imagination, as John
Paul Lederach puts it, needed to re-envision peace. Secondly, these legacy issues are being openly exploited to focus mobilisation against the political peace process, used strategically by opponents to try to reverse political gains, which makes their interest in the past and in victims a means to electoral advantage. Thirdly, in this maelstrom of anti-agreement mobilisation, we are experiencing a downwardly spiralling cycle of moral recalibration that is both counter-productive to progress in the social peace process and morally reprehensible.
Let me spend a little time on the third dimension, before returning to the first. Moral recalibration is evident in selective moral condemnation of the past and in the re-emergence of old-style whataboutery.
Selective moral condemnation is palpable in many ways. For example, it is obvious in the dismissive and flippant attitude amongst most of the Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist community toward the indisputable evidence of state collusion. Selective moral condemnation is plain also in Sinn Fein’s insensitivity towards PUL community feelings over some of its recent memorialisations. It is apparent in the way respective communities honour their own combatants but criticise when the ‘other community’ honours theirs, and in demands for amnesty for one’s own ex-combatants, but not for all. Selective moralisation is manifest also in the strident assertion of the right to one’s own cultural practices but the unwillingness to accept the cultural practic es of the ‘other’.
People are here, of course, locating the various problems arising from the legacy of the conflict within different and competing moral frameworks. There is no shared peace vocation, no shared moral vision as to what peace means and what it might deliver for our grandchildren, and no common value orientation promoted by the shared commitment to the
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idea of peace. We have, therefore, the same polarised moral frameworks we have always had and which helped to shape the conflict in the first place. There is a complete moral vacuum when it comes to imagining what a shared, peaceful future might look like.
Instead, sadly, selective and partisan moral condemnation reinforces whataboutery, both in politics and in the victim sector. The re-emergence of whataboutery is unmistakable in three important ways that are witness to how reprehensible is the moral recalibration occurring in our damaged peace.
The first, is the use of a victim hierarchy in which one’s own community is said to have suffered the most, with the ‘other’ community’s behaviour being the more heinous; secondly, in the use of b laming strategies in which the ‘other community’ is always the one with the primary responsibility for the conflict and for any failures in the peace; and thirdly, in the avoidance of acknowledgement – the absence of internal reflexivity within people and organisations – political, religious, civil and paramilitary – in which we reflect on our own acts of commission or acts of omission, during both the conflict and the peace.
These dimensions are equally morally reprehensible, yet as part of the selective moral condemnation that pervades our damaged peace, some ask of others what they refuse to do themselves.
I believe that selective moral condemnation and whataboutery are morally corrupting practices, leading to fruitless debates about who killed more, who suffered more, and who was the more heinous. It is morally repugnant to respect some victims over others, to condemn some killings and not all, to demand some are held to account but not others, and to engage in a sectarian headcount of who killed the least.
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The sort of moral recalibration has very negative consequences for the likelihood of progress in the social peace process and for societal healing. Some of the damaging consequences of selective moral condemnation and whataboutery are the following:
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Partisan and one-sided memories of the past and of the conflict itself;
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The use of selective and partisan memories as a bludgeon to beat the ‘other’ and to stymie progress , making ‘truth’ a weapon to continue the conflict by other means, not a source of healing;
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Political mobilisation to oppose compromise, tolerance and healing, processes which get represented as negative things, so that compromise, for example, is said to be bad, rather than something we do every day of our lives and in almost everything;
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Political withdrawal and political disaffection amongst those who would otherwise support agreement, whose withdrawal is motivated by the view of ‘a plague on both their houses’;
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The rise in non-voting and non-registration, especially within the pro-peace constituency that is most needed to vote in support of compromise and tolerance;
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The perpetuation of divided politics and a fractured civil society;
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And a lack of grace and mercy in how we deal with the legacy of the past.
I wish to draw my lecture to conclusion by emphasising the most important implication that follows from its argument. Namely, that the problem we face in managing the social peace process is not so much political, but moral. We need to reverse the negative moral recalibration that is occurring in our damaged peace by re-envisioning peace, by recommitting ourselves to peace as a positive vocation, to developing a value orientation, if you like, that shapes a new moral imagination. We need to refill what has become a moral vacuum, but replenish it not with the same old divided and competing moral frameworks that
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shaped the conflict in the past, but infill it with an embracing, uplifting, hope-inspiring vision of peace. We need to debate the sort of moral framework necessary that commits us to want to learn to live together in tolerance. Twenty years on from the ceasefires, it is disgraceful to say we’ve never had this sort of discussion in public.
Because of the limits of politics, as I outlined them earlier, our politicians cannot, perhaps will not do this for us. But civil society can. How? By civil society groups, and us as members of civil society condemning selective moralising, by challenging the competing moral frameworks through which the past is selectively and partisanly appropriated. By reasserting the grace and mercy needed to re-envision peace. By engaging in our own reflexive acknowledgement by owning-up to the acts of commission and omission for which we’re responsible. By beginning public debate about the key issues that shape the legacy of the past, topics like truth, forgiveness, hope, victimhood, and culpability, that currently feed negative moral recalibration, and by giving cultural space for public expressions of righteous anger, and of the loss, grief and sorrow that we went through to earn us peace. By beginning to assert the essential unity of the experience of suffering, allowing us to empathise with everyone’s suffering and to see this empathy as a moral virtue that unites us, rather than divides. By beginning to formulate what a shared society means and how we might learn to live together in tolerance.
I could go on and on, time prevents me. But my point is simple. As I said at the beginning, I am but a one-point lecturer tonight. And that point is that the future is ours if we care to take responsibility for it away from politicians. Thank you.
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