Conclusion: a Broader Perspective on Northern Ireland’s Peace Process

Abstract

The Northern Ireland peace process does not operate in a vacuum. Thirty-eight peace accords were reached between 1988 and 1998, many of which broke with past practice and explored new ways of negotiating a peace deal.1 There was a significant degree of lending and borrowing between contemporary peace processes. South Africa became the main template for many modern peace processes, with the ‘sufficient consensus’ idea being copied in Northern Ireland. The Basques in turn looked to Northern Ireland as a model. Herri Batasuna’s leader Arnaldo Otegi confessed that ‘Ireland was a mirror for us, and so was the republican movement’.2 In 1998 Herri Batasuna invited all political parties and other movements to participate in an ‘Ireland Forum’, explicitly to explore the relevance of the Northern Ireland process to the Basque country; the Lizarra Agreement which followed borrowed heavily from the Irish example. So contemporary peace processes can be viewed as a cascade of new approaches, borrowing from earlier lessons and mistakes, and lending new experiences to the corpus of knowledge. The conscious interrelationship between peace-making initiatives in different parts of the world was underlined by the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in December 2000. In the midst of the mounting crisis in Israel he had time to reflect that, ‘if we don’t make an agreement and drift, God forbid, into a situation of deterioration, there will be cracks in other peace deals’.3KeywordsCivil SocietyBroad PerspectiveBasque CountryPolitical ViolencePeace AccordThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.