Next month, the Irish and British people should be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement serves as the cornerstone of the power-sharing deal between Northern Ireland’s unionists and nationalists that helped bring an end to years of violence. It has cemented a long-term constitutional settlement between the United Kingdom and Ireland, in which both states agree that the people of Northern Ireland are free to choose their own destiny. There won’t be any Happy Birthday party this year, however. The power-sharing arrangement that governs the North is on hold, and some prominent British politicians are suggesting that the deal ought to be abandoned altogether.
The Good Friday Agreement faces real internal challenges. First, the center has fallen out of Northern Irish politics. The more moderate Ulster Unionist Party and Social Democratic and Labour Party that were at the center of the original peace deal have been displaced by their more intransigent respective unionist and nationalist rivals, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein. Meanwhile, the smaller cross-community parties that helped cement the initial deal have largely disappeared. The result is that hard-liners on both sides now dominate the Northern Irish power-sharing executive envisaged by the agreement.
Read the full piece at Foreign Affairs.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:03/29/2018