Berkley Center

When the text of the Good Friday Agreement was published shortly before the referendum that would ratify the agreement, the cover showed a family of four, arm in arm, gazing into a beautiful sunset. The text on the cover stressed to the reader that the agreement was about “your future” and that the upcoming referendum was “your decision.” The people of Northern Ireland took seriously this attempt to personalize the decision, with an astonishing 81 percent of registered voters casting ballots on May 22, 1998. Many felt that this was the first truly inclusive vote in Northern Ireland’s history: It did not ask voters who they would send to a parliament of which one community was wary if not skeptical; instead, it sought legitimacy for a wholly new form of government that promised equal and guaranteed engagement with as many different constituencies as possible. The agreement promised unionist and nationalist, loyalist and republican, Protestant and Catholic alike a voice in the future of Northern Ireland.

Almost exactly four years earlier, another ballot (this time a general election) in another part of the world had seen an even higher turnout: 87 percent of eligible voters queued for many hours to choose their representatives in the first democratically elected parliament in South Africa. This vote too promised a new future, and it too meant the effective end of a long and bloody civil war. But this was not the only way that the fate of South Africa and Northern Ireland in the 1990s were interlinked. It emerged that the iconic photograph on the cover of the Good Friday Agreement booklet was not taken in Northern Ireland, but in South Africa. The photograph yoked the fortunes of Northern Ireland to a different negotiated settlement in a different place, but one to which parallels had often been drawn throughout the troubles, both in the popular imagination and in scholarly writing (see, for example, Prof. Adrian Guelke’s definitive work on the matter).

While the differences between the South African and Northern Irish situations were and are varied and stark—divisions in South Africa, for example, are rarely expressed along religious lines—the comparison continues to bear fruit, as both places inch along the winding road to full democratic and shared governance. The heady promises of the end of minority rule in South Africa have frequently been forgotten in the parade of real and manufactured scandals since. Meanwhile, the one scandal that really matters carries on almost unabated: The continued poverty of the majority of the population for whom the collapse of apartheid has meant more symbolically than economically. What was called in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s the “peace dividend” has been unevenly distributed in South Africa. At times, it must feel like gazing into a rapidly waning sunset, and yet there can be no question that the troubled peace of South Africa today is better than the ugly violence of yesterday.

The same story has been repeated again and again across the former European empires over the course of the twentieth century as the promise of decolonization fades away in the face of the realities of postcolonial governance. To speak of Northern Ireland as colonized or postcolonial is deeply controversial, with strongly held feelings on either side of a division that frequently manifests along religious lines. At the same time, the impulse to think of Northern Ireland as not a place apart, but rather as part of a complex system that has emerged out of the end of European empires, is vitally important as we face into the third decade of the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland currently grapples with a suspended legislature and ailing agreement, and faces into the uncertain future of Brexit, seen by many as its own kind of sunset. Its people and its politicians would do well to look beyond the borders of Ireland and the United Kingdom to ask what kind of democracy is possible in the wake of empire.

Sunsets are inescapable outcomes of new dawns, and we are born, as Samuel Beckett wrote, “astride of a grave.” The lesson from the global history of decolonization is not that we must not try to make a perfect democracy, but that even the most perfect democratic outcome is always a deeply flawed reflection of its initial promise. And yet we try. Northern Ireland lives, peacefully, in the shadow of a grand promise that will only ever be realized imperfectly.