Putting the Peaces Back Together: The ‘Long’ Liberalising Peace in Northern Ireland, from O’Neill to PEACE

Abstract

The European Union’s Programmes for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (PEACE I, II and III, 1994–2011) are assumed to be unique, unprecedented interventions designed for the specific context of the Troubles. Yet they are part of a much broader and historically deeper trend: the European liberal(ising) peace project, which emerged from World War I and World War II and evolved as part of the (post‐) Cold War reconstruction framework. The first, in the 1960s, took place through programmes and rhetoric of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, who fused the Brooke government’s ambitious post‐partition state‐building plans with the liberal polity‐building project, both normatively and structurally. The PEACE programmes, this article argues, constituted the second attempt to extend this version of peace‐as‐polity‐building into Northern Ireland, albeit in a much more overt, intentional and comprehensive manner.