The principle of recognition: the people,state universality and the Good Friday Agreement

Abstract

The article contributes to debates on the relationship between the state and ‘the people’ in post-national contexts, specifically those characterised by intra-state conflicts. The article critically theorises the articulation of this relationship in the Good Friday Agreement as part of the Northern Irish peace process. It employs the concept of ‘state universality’ to examine the way in which the state-people relationship is constructed on the basis of the recognition of multiple peoples, establishing the universality of the state in a postnational fashion. The article also draws on the work of Claude Lefort to examine the implications of this form in terms of political representation, arguing that the recognition of multiple peoples at stake in the Good Friday Agreement is predicated on the particularisation of the two communities, thus divesting political representation of the dimension of universality.

Keywords

Northern Ireland the state the Good Friday Agreement the people universality

Introduction

Foucault famously challenged political theory to ‘cut off the King's head’ in order to understand contemporary power relations. Today, we might say that the challenge is to cut off the people's head. A host of contemporary writers have argued that the people no longer function as the subject of sovereignty and that the regime of authority associated with the modern nation state is being displaced. This article presents a theoretical investigation of the articulation of the relationship between the state and the people in the context of Northern Ireland, where conflicting visions of sovereignty and nationhood have been at the heart of armed conflict (Kearney 1997; O'Duffy 1999, 2000).

A number of commentators have emphasised the innovative and progressive element of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), arguing that it makes for a much needed move beyond the out-dated straightjacket of the nation-state and the reconciliation of a protracted and violent conflict. It does so by recognising the rights and identity of both parties to the conflict in ways, it is argued, that move beyond fundamental elements of the modern nation state. This article contributes to such research by going beyond a description of how the GFA differs from more traditional varieties of statehood to critically theorise this novel formulation in its own terms. In order to do so, I propose that the concept of ‘state universality’ allows us to analyse the articulation of the state-people relationship beyond the framework of the nation. This approach, moreover, allows us to conceptualise the dimension of depoliticisation at stake in the transformation of the Northern Irish state, a dimension which is analysed here and elaborated upon with regard to its implications for political representation as it operates in Northern Ireland's post-conflict political institutions. Drawing on the political philosophy of Calude Lefort, I argue that the manner in which the GFA recognises the ‘two communities’ divests the field of political contestation of the dimension of universality, thus particularising and factionalising politics. The article thus contributes to debates around the challenges to democracy associated with the post-peace process institutions.

The article begins with the task of theorising the relationship between the state and the people in post-national contexts. In modern political thought, this relationship has most often been addressed in relation to the nation state and the question of sovereignty, and, as such, theory around both of these is discussed. The article then introduces the concept of state universality and develops its potential with regard to the critical analysis of the state-people relationship in post-national contexts. The remainder of the article focuses specifically on the GFA and the political institutions it establishes. It begins by examining the Constitutional Issues section of the GFA document, were the problematic of the state and people is articulated most clearly. The final section of the article builds on the analysis of the Constitutional Issues section to theorise the democratic and political implications of the GFA's articulation of the state-people relationship in the context of the institutions of political representation established by the peace process.

Theorising the relationship between the state and the people

The relationship between the state and the people has been theorised in a wide variety of work examining modern national sovereignty and the nation state. Sovereignty involves the claim to ultimate or highest authority in relation to a polity (Bartelson 1995; Brown 2010; Singer and Weir 2006, 2008), operating as ‘the discursive form in which a claim concerning the existence and character of a supreme ordering power for a particular polity is expressed…’ (Walker 2003b: 6, author's emphasis). National sovereignty posits the nation-state as supreme authority and both draws authority from and exercises authority over the ‘people’ (Singer and Weir 2008). The people should not be conceptualised here as an objective, quasi-natural phenomenon upon which national sovereignty is founded, but rather as a figure of representation bound up with national sovereignty itself (Bartelson 1995; Andersen 2003; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2009; Singer and Wier 2006; 2008). The notion of a national people has typically mobilised claims of territorial unity and linguistic, racial, cultural or genealogical homogeneity (Anderson 1993; Habermas 2001, 1998; Smith 1995; Weber 1994). This homogenising conception of the people, moreover, has been produced via processes of othering which ‘externalise’ difference in the form of the nation-state's ‘outsiders’ (Goldberg 1994, 2002). The constitution of the nation is thus embedded in the production of sameness and difference:

Whereas within its domain, the nation-state and its attendant ideological structures work tirelessly to create and reproduce the purity of the people, on the outside the nation-state is a machine that produces Others, creates racial difference, and raises boundaries that delimit and support the modern subject of sovereignty. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 114)

In the above I have focused on the relationship between identity and difference under national sovereignty because this is the dimension which is of primary concern in terms of the Northern Irish conflict, where both the Unionist vision of British sovereignty and the Republican vision of Irish sovereignty were perceived as exclusionary vis-à-vis the ‘other’ population, leading to political deadlock (Kearney 1997; O'Duffy 2000; O'Neill 2007; Morison 2013). Both visions are characterised by key elements of national sovereignty, in particular the ideal and absolute alignment of the people, the state and territory, as well as an emphasis on culture and identity. It is worth noting here that the nationalistic underpinnings of Unionism (Shirlow and McGovern 1997) are somewhat paradoxical, given that the UK's wider constitutional tradition is at odds with national sovereignty as expressed in the more continental variety which often serves as an ideal type in discussions of the shift to post-national forms of sovereignty (Habermas 1998; Hardt and Negri 2000; Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Brown 2010). The UK, indeed, has often been described as a multi-regional and even multi-national construction. The relationship between the GFA and UK sovereignty is no doubt worthy of an article in its own right. However, this is not the focus here. Instead, the present article focuses on the relationship between the state and the people as expressed in the GFA and in relation to the territory of Northern Ireland and its corresponding political institutions.

Many writers have analysed the rearticulation of sovereignty under the processes of globalisation and the proliferation of local governance arrangements (Morison 2013; Latham 2000; Ong 2000, 1999; Sassen 2006, 1996; Walker 2008). Researchers have also identified a shift in terms of the regime of identity and difference at the heart of national sovereignty (Hard and Negri 2009; 2000; Papadopoulos et al. 2008). Today's forms of power, according to this body of work, function by incorporating, rather than negating, differences (Hardt and Negri 2000; Papadopoulos et al. 2008). Hardt and Negri (2000), for example, argue that ‘imperial sovereignty’ can function outside of the bounded and internally homogenous space of the nation-state and is characterised by permeable mobile borders, which open outwards, allowing new nodes to be incorporated into the network. This is a form of sovereignty which is not threatened by difference; multiple subjectivities, identities and desires are incorporated and managed. In contrast to modern national sovereignty, ‘[t]he imperial “solution” will not be to negate or attenuate these differences, but rather to affirm and arrange them in an effective apparatus of command…’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 200). In this situation the people no longer anchors the political order:

The concept of the people no longer functions as the organised subject of the system of command, and consequently the identity of the people is replaced by the mobility, flexibility, and perpetual differentiation of the multitude. This shift demystifies and destroys the circular modern idea of the legitimacy of power which constructs from the multitude a single subject that could then in turn legitimate that same power. That sophistic tautology no longer works. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 344)

The shift towards post-national political constellations thus evokes a reworking, or even abandoning, of the triptych of people, state and nation and the form of organising identity and difference associated with the nation state.

Similarly, some of the literature on intra-state and self-determination conflicts also suggests that the link between the people and the state must be weakened in order to accommodate minority nationalisms (Walker 2003a; Keating 2003; Oklopcic 2012). In the Northern Irish case, the conflict centred on the fact that ‘dual claims of absolute sovereignty exercised over the same territory by two sovereign governments are inevitably condemned to conflict’ (Kearney 1997: 24; see also O'Duffy 1999, 2000). Subsequent literature has identified how the innovations at the heart of the GFA respond to the dilemma articulated by Kearney and involve a shift away from national sovereignty, conceptualising the GFA in terms of a ‘bi-national ethos’ (O'Neill 2007), ‘co-sovereignty’ (O'Leary 1998), ‘sovereignty pooling’ (O'Duffy 2000) and ‘flexible’, ‘blurred’ and ‘shared’ sovereignty (Crighton 2003; Doyle 2004; Bell 2008; Morison 2009).

In this regard, Morison underlines the fact that the people do not figure in the GFA. He notes that ‘[t]here is no “We, the people…” moment where individuals seeing themselves as somehow possessing some commonality that transcends other allegiances so that the universal rights expressed here can form a basis for a common citizenship’ (Morison 2009: 287). Bell (2008), following a similar line of argument, describes ‘state redefinition’, the reworking of the link between the people and the state, as a key feature of the GFA. However, if the GFA redefines the relationship between the state and the people, what remains to be addressed is precisely how the novel relationship at stake here operates.

State universality

The subject of the people and its articulation as the foundation of the state and the source of sovereignty is, of course, central to the construction of the democratic nature of the nation state and, hence, its claim to exercise legitimate authority. The concept of state universality is developed here to conceptualise this, but also to trace the rearticulation of the relationship between people and state under the GFA.

The universality of the state refers to the fact that the state presents itself as representing everybody, as an institution which stands over and above the particular and private interests which traverse the polity (and threaten, in Hobessian fashion, to tear it apart) thus constituting a public power which is identified with the polity as a whole (Bartelson 2001; 1995). Of course the paradigmatic foundation for the universality of the state is the nation, whether it is presented as an a priori unity founded on racial/cultural identity (Habermas 1998) or as a political unity which must be constructed, for example, in resistance to colonial regimes and the divisions they impose to maintain control (Hardt and Negri 2000; Neocosmos 1998). By aligning itself with the nation and the people the nation-state claims to transcend particular interests and stand for the polity tout court.

Conceptualising state universality requires that we recognise the symbolic dimension of the state. This involves moving beyond approaches which emphasise the conception of the state as a bureaucracy or in terms of legitimate violence (Wacquant 1996) in order to focus on how the state gains its symbolic power, or how it comes to appear as a unity which stands over and above the polity (Abrams 2006; Bartelson 2001; Bourdieu 1994). Here it is vital to emphasise the constitutive dimension of state universality, i.e. its operation as a ‘symbolic regime’ within which the exercising of power is rendered intelligible (Singer and Weir 2006). This is most apparent in discourses of sovereignty, as it is here that state's claim to authority is most clearly articulated. Needless to say, claims to universality often, if not always, hide more particular interests. For instance, Marx’ critique of Hegel's political philosophy consists in demonstrating that ‘the state is not an embodiment of universal interest, but that it is ultimately derivative and expressive of particular interests in society’ and that ‘[a]s a consequence, the symbolic expressions of unity and universality associated with the state are in fact arbitrary and contingent, reflecting particular claims to universality' (Bartelson 2001: 118). Nevertheless, these claims to universality are crucial to the efficacy and legitimacy of the state and its political order.

In Northern Ireland the universality of the state (or lack thereof) has been a key issue (Byrne 2012). The Civil Rights Movement of 1968 focused on identifying and resisting discrimination against the Catholic minority and thus politicised the sectarian nature of the state (Byrne 2014). As the conflict developed and became militarised, Irish Republicans continued to challenge the legitimacy of the Northern state on the basis that it was inherently sectarian and was incapable of equally recognising or representing the non-unionist/ British population. Conversely, a central tenet of Unionism is the notion that the Irish Republic was a particularistic state irrevocably identified with the Catholic Church and incapable of representing Protestantism, Unionism or Britishness. The deadlock thus presented consists in the inability to think the legitimate exercise of power and the problematic of universality beyond nation-statist modes (Kearney 1997; O'Duffy 1999). In what follows I present an analysis of the way in which the GFA confronts this problematic and ultimately re-articulates the relationship between the state and the people.

State universality under the Good Friday Agreement

The analysis presented in this section focuses on the Constitutional Issues section of the text of the GFA, as it is here that the question of sovereignty and the relationship between the state and the people is articulated most explicitly. The first pages of the Constitutional Issues section set out a problematisation of the absence of a unified people. Items I, II and III paint a clearly unworkable mix of sovereign claims. The first item begins with a reference to what we might initially assume would be the political subject at the heart of the GFA, the ‘people of Northern Ireland’:

(i) [The participants] recognise the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status, whether they prefer to continue to support the Union with Great Britain or a sovereign united Ireland;

Already in the second item, however, another ‘people’ appears:

(ii) [The participants] recognise that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish, accepting that this right must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland;

There is obviously a tension between these concepts, as the ‘people of Ireland’ criss-crosses the ‘people of Northern Ireland’. This jumble is further complicated in item (iii):

(iii) [The participants] acknowledge that while a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union and, accordingly, that Northern Ireland's status as part of the United Kingdom reflects and relies upon that wish; and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people;

Clearly, the foregoing items do not present any mode through which a Northern Irish state could be presented as a universal institution rather than pertaining to one or other of the antagonists. Item V, however, responds to this dilemma as it introduces the form of sovereignty at work in the GFA:

(v) [The participants] affirm that whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, the power of the sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of, civil, political, social and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities (author's emphasis).

Instead of expressing the sovereignty of a unified people, Item V articulates the relationship between ‘the power of the sovereign government’ and the people in terms of the recognition of competing national sovereignties and identities. This is evidenced in the commitment to ‘parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos and aspirations of both communities’ (my emphasis). The aspirations referred to here are of course those of a United Ireland or the maintenance of the Union with Great Britain. The ‘declaration of support’, in which the participants ‘acknowledge the substantial differences between our continuing, and equally legitimate, political aspirations’, is also relevant here as is the GFA's recognition of ‘the right to pursue democratically national and political aspirations’ and the ‘the right to seek constitutional change by peaceful and legitimate means’. This formulation is clearly at odds with any nation-statist framework, as it moves from the positing of the state as the direct expression of the sovereignty of the people (i.e. the identification of the state and the people) to the positing of the state as the source of the recognition of diverse peoples. The relationship between the state and the people is thus founded on what I will call the ‘principle of recognition’. The shift here is from the direct identification of the state and the people to the founding of the state on the recognition of the legitimate claims of multiple peoples or communities.

All of the existing accounts describe the contemporary NI state as ‘binational’ (O'Neill 2007) or ‘bicommunal’, or in terms of ‘blurred’ (Bell 2008), ‘shared’ (Crighton 2003), ‘flexible’ (Doyle 2004) or ‘plurinational’ (Keating 2003) sovereignty. Such approaches suggest that sovereignty is somehow shared or divided between the ‘two communities’. In contrast, I argue that the GFA involves more than a ‘blurring’ of sovereignty or the ‘sharing’ of the latter between two peoples. At stake here is not simply a ‘squeezing in’ of an additional people. Indeed, to posit a notion of bi-national or blurred sovereignty is to ignore the constitutive indivisibility of sovereignty (Brown 2010). Moreover, my contention is that a close reading of Item V and attention to the principle of recognition can allow us to conceptualise more fully the novelty of the GFA and to grasp the problematic of depoliticisation at stake therein.

Here it is necessary to examine how recognition functions as an articulation of the relationship between the state and the people in order to understand its relationship to state universality. Recognition establishes a distance between the state and the particular communities it recognises. ‘Distance’ here denotes that the recogniser and the recognised cannot be identical; a separation is required for recognition to function. Furthermore, recognition is the very operation through which this symbolic distance is established. The mechanism at work here can be usefully conceptualised along the lines of Žižek's analysis of liberal multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism … respects the Other's identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made possible by his/her universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist; he or she does not oppose to the other the particular values of his or her own culture); none the less he or she retains the position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly – multiculturalist respect for the Other's specificity is the very form of asserting one's own superiority. (Žižek 1999: 216, my emphasis)

I don't want to suggest that the GFA is necessarily racist (for a discussion of this question see Lentin and McVeigh 2006). Rather, I am interested in the way Žižek conceptualises the functioning of multicultural recognition as an operation which establishes the recogniser in the ‘empty point of universality’ in the very moment it recognises the particularity of the ‘other’. In a similar fashion, the GFA's ‘principle of recognition’ posits the state as a neutral locus of recognition in the very moment it recognises the particular identities and claims of the ‘two communities’, hence presenting itself as the ‘empty point of universality’. The state does not represent the people, it recognises the peoples.

Under national sovereignty the diversity of the polity is overcome via the subject of the people which, as argued above, is a specific form of the organisation of identity and difference. In Hobbes’ theory of modern sovereignty, for instance, unity is staged not as the absence of difference but as the resolution or transcendence of particular and conflicting interests. Indeed it is these conflicts, posited as a priori in modern political philosophy, which make necessary a universal state. In the words of Rousseau, ‘the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of those interests made it possible’ (Rousseau quoted in Bartelson 1995: 212). This unity and internal identity is accomplished via the negation and externalisation of ‘others’. Under the GFA, in contrast, the unity and universality of the state is not founded on the identification of the state with a subject that can transcend and externalises difference (i.e. the people), but rather by disidentifying with any one subject and establishing a source of recognition for diverse identities. This attests to a relationship between state and people which is founded on the recognition of diversity, rather than on its negation. In this regard the GFA has been accompanied by a whole series of changes in the symbolism of the state to reflect the ‘cultures’ of ‘both communities’ (e.g. flags, emblems, public space, public rituals, the symbolism of public institutions, cultural and language rights, see Bell 2008; O'Neill 2007). The principle of recognition incorporates differences into the very heart of state universality, and as such the polity.

State universality, particularisation and depoliticisation

Furthermore, as the state cloaks itself in the universality of recognition it simultaneously operates a profound particularisation, as it is the very recognition of particular identities and claims whish positions the state in the empty point of universality. Consider the fate of Irish Republicanism under the GFA. Irish Republicanism's claim to national sovereignty is recognised as ‘equally legitimate’, but only (and paradoxically) at the price of eliminating the people as the subject of sovereignty. It is a kind of quid pro quo according to which the post-conflict state will recognise the sovereignty of the Irish people if the Irish people recognise that the state can be founded on a principle that subordinates the people qua sovereign subject. This move even has its own ‘constitutional moment’ in the referenda on the GFA, which took place north and south of the border. In particular, the electorate of the Republic were asked to renounce the Republic's claim to sovereignty over the northern part of the country while at the same time voting for a document which recognises the legitimacy of the sovereign claim to a united Ireland. This poses the following question: what is Irish Republicanism once it renounces the belief in the absolute sovereignty of the people? It becomes a particular identity. What has been gotten rid of here is the universal component of national sovereignty and of Irish Republicanism; it is reduced to a particular claim, a kind of idiosyncrasy of a particular community. In this sense, state universality under the GFA is dependent on the reproduction of particular communities or identities. The GFA both constructs state universality via the principle of recognition and sets in motion a process of depoliticisation through which the ‘two communities’ are both incorporated (i.e. included in the state/polity) and particularised (i.e. reduced to mere identities and denuded of universal claims). Herein lies the heart of the proliferation of an identitarian logic in Northern Irish politics.

The principal of recognition, depoliticisation and political representation

In the remainder of this article I want to set out the consequences of the articulation of the relationship between the state and the people, and the corresponding form of state universality, described above, in terms of the transformation of the field of political representation, in order to elaborate the critique set out so far and to examine its implications for democracy. In order to do so a brief examination of Claude Lefort's perspective on the relationship between democracy and political representation will be useful.

Lefort defines political representation as ‘the field of competition between protagonists whose mode of action and programmes explicitly designate them as laying claim to the exercise of public authority’ (Lefort quoted in Marchart 2007: 91). Lefort argues that while popular sovereignty is founded on the people as the subject of sovereignty, the people, since it is ‘not a determinate, positive entity’ (Singer and Weir 2008: 55) is never directly ‘present’ and thus needs to be ‘represented’. No one can determine once and for all what the will of the people is. For this reason, Lefort conceptualises the people not as an empirical subject but as a symbolic place which is structurally empty: the place of the people can never be completely occupied (Lefort 1986; Marchart 2007; Singer and Weir 2006, 2008). Political parties compete to represent the people and occupy their place, but they can only occupy that structurally empty place temporarily as representation is never complete, it is subject to contestation (Lefort 1986; Singer and Weir 2006). Elections, the key mode of political representation in democracies, are the mechanism through which a particular party comes to represent the universal sovereignty of the people, and when that party occupies the state via the formation of the Executive and the government the sovereignty of the people is identified with the state (Lefort 1986). This is the ‘anti-foundational’ foundation of the mode of political representation under the democratic form of popular sovereignty (Marchart 2007). Totalitarianism, on the other hand, refers to a situation in which a party becomes directly and irrevocably identified with the people, such that political representation breaks down altogether (Lefort 1986). The place of the people is no longer ‘empty’ nor is it subject to contestation, and hence the democratic form of representation no longer operates (Marchart 2007). Conversely, in one brief but insightful passage, Lefort describes the contrary situation, in which the place of the people is not only structurally empty, but structurally absent:

If the place of power appears, no longer as symbolically, but as really empty, then those who exercise it are perceived as mere ordinary individuals, as forming a faction at the service of private interests and, by the same token, legitimacy collapses throughout society. The privatization of groups, of individuals and of each sector of activity increases: each strives to make its individual or corporate interests prevail. Carried to an extreme there is no longer a civil society. (Lefort 1986: 279, author's emphasis)

The above quote suggests that where Lefort's ‘place of the people’ disappears, those who compete in the field of political representation are reduced to factions; the universal dimension of the people no longer exists and hence the field of political representation is particularised.

My contention is that under the GFA's ‘principal of recognition’ the ‘place of the people’ is not only structurally empty but structurally absent. This reflects the argument developed above in relation to the subordination of the people and the state's monopolisation or universality via recognition. It further manifests in the fact that the form of political representation established by the GFA, consistent with the analysis presented thus far, structurally prevents any one political party or community from universally representing the polity. This is the case, as argued below, in terms of the formation of the Assembly (parliament) and the formation of the Executive under the ‘consociational’ or ‘power-sharing’ arrangements of the GFA.

In terms of elections, the casting and counting of votes in NI operates according to the standard PR system. The crucial difference happens when the delegates take their seats in the Assembly. The GFA stipulates that ‘members of the Assembly will register a designation of identity – nationalist, unionist or other – for the purposes of measuring cross-community support in Assembly votes….’ On the basis of this designation the Assembly divides the elected representatives into two politically privileged identitarian blocks (Unionist and Nationalist) and a third category of ‘others’ (Taylor 2006; Wilford and Wilson 2001). The latter suffer a formal exclusion in the sense that they are not counted for the purpose of measuring ‘cross-community support’ (Finlay 2010; Whitaker 2004). Cross-community support means that the authority of the Assembly can only be exercised when there is both a simple majority and the support of at least forty per cent of each of the national blocs (Wilford and Wilson 2001). Cross-community support is required for the formation of the Executive, key decisions, the annual programme for government and budget, and a host of other matters (Knox 2010). It is the central operational principle of government (Taylor 2006).

The formation of the Executive, moreover, is based on the consociationalist principle of power-sharing and this further compounds the dynamic operating in the formation of the Assembly. The ‘power-sharing executive’, through the D’Hondt procedure, distributes ministerial positions according to each party's share of the vote, in practice incorporating virtually all the parties present in the Assembly. The result is a ‘cross-community’ Executive which represents the diversity of the population. Because of the way the Executive is formed and because executive decisions are subject to cross-community support, a single political party cannot occupy the Executive or wield executive power in the manner of standard representational democracy (Finlay 2010). Such measures are of course designed to guarantee political representation and a role in government for ‘both communities’, thus assuaging fears each ‘community’ may feel in terms of being dominated by the ‘other’ (McGarry and O'Leary 2009). However, and although these measures may indeed be expedient, their implications vis-à-vis democracy must be scrutinised. The most significant of these implications is that the political field no longer serves as a space in which actors compete to represent the polity as a whole (i.e. contest the terrain of universality) but rather reduces participants to the role of representing their community under the conditions of cross-community decision making (Whitaker 2004). As such representation functions as a kind of mirror to the population, reflecting and reinforcing the particular differences upon which the state founds itself. In this sense, the mechanisms of political representation set up under the GFA are an expression of the particularisation of the ‘two communities’ which, as argued above, is inherent to the principal of recognition as a mode of establishing the universality of the state and of rendering authoritative government thinkable and practicable. The ‘place of the people’, understood in Lefort's terms as a symbolic space of universality subject to continual contestation, is absent. Instead universality is monopolised by the ‘principle of recognition’ which cannot be contested and remains the preserve of the state. The form of state universality at stake here resembles Ranciere's description of ‘consensualist centrism’:

Consensualist centrism flourishes with the multiplication of differences and identities. It nourishes itself with the complexification of the elements that need to be accounted for in a community, with the permanent process of autorepresentation, with all the elements and all their differences: the larger the number of groups and identities that need to be taken into account in society, the greater the need for arbitration. (Ranciere 2000: 125, my emphasis)

Under the principle of recognition, the state thus monopolises universality due to its positioning in the role of ‘arbiter’; the more each community struggles to be recognised the greater the need for the state qua recogniser. As such, to return to Lefort's formulation cited above, those who ‘exercise power’ are perceived as ‘forming a faction at the service of private interests’.

The institutionalisation of sectarianism and the principle of recognition

The central argument of this article is that, the GFA's articulation of the relationship between the state and the people establishes the universality of the state via the ‘principle of recognition’ and in doing so divests the field of political representation of universality and, hence, its contestation, thus reducing it to a series of clashes and negotiations between particular identities and interests. This theorisation can usefully contribute to some of the debates around these questions in the contemporary literature.

The GFA, from the outset, has been subject to consistent critiques from liberal and more radical commentators. Liberals (e.g. Taylor 2001, 2006; Wilford and Wilson 2001) have argued that by recognising the identities of each national community and by granting them such a strong role in government, the GFA both institutionalises the identities which have sustained the conflict and fails to provide any universal basis for citizenship. Similarly, more radical commentators have pointed towards the ‘institutionalisation of sectarianism’. Marxist variants (e.g. McCann 2009; McKearney 2011) tend to position this as a continuing attempt to divide the working class (usually implicitly posited as the ‘true’ universal subject of politics because of its alleged capacity to transcend sectarian identities). A similarly critical approach (e.g. McVeigh and Rolston 2007) is more concerned with the depoliticisation of republicanism, echoing some of the literature critical of multiculturalism (Goldberg 1994; Lentin and McVeigh 2006). Others, often influenced by feminism, post colonialism and queer studies, emphasise the exclusion of ‘others’ under the post-conflict dispensation (Chan 2006; Edkins 2006; Finlay 2010; Whitaker 2004) and tend to critique the very notion of universality as a Eurocentric construction (Edkins 2006; see also Finlay 2004).

As should be clear from the analysis set out above, I draw on and share much with these critiques of the GFA. However, the theorisation of the GFA elaborated here allows us to conceptualise universality and identity not in antithetical terms, as they have been in the existing research, but rather as part of the same complex. It is not the case that the GFA abandons the terrain of universality in favour of outright identitarianism but rather that the very manner in which state universality is staged is founded on the particularising recognition, incorporation and institutionalisation of the two national ‘communities’, thus reproducing identities in the very moment the universality of the state is established. Moreover, by developing this theorisation with reference to the work of Lefort, we can grasp more precisely what is at stake in the factionalisation of politics so apparent in contemporary Northern Ireland: this factionalisation is at bottom the consequence of the elimination of the ‘place of the people’, the state's monopolisation of the ‘empty point of universality’ and the divestment of the field of political representation of any dimension of universality.

Conclusion

This article has aimed to contribute to theoretical work on the relationship between the state and the people in post-conflict Northern Ireland and its relationship to the depoliticising institutionalisation of particular identities. As argued above, this can usefully contribute to current debates on the democratic dilemmas which confront contemporary NI politics. However, there are a number of other contributions worth discussing by way of a conclusion. Firstly, the examination of the GFA ties in with contemporary debates on post-national political constellations. As noted at the outset, one body of literature relevant here emphasises the transnational nature of contemporary sovereignty, highlighting the de-territorialisation of sovereignty as a result of transnational flows of people, goods and money; the breakdown of the homogenous conception of the nation under pressure from minority struggles and the proliferation of difference as well as new scales of governance above, below and beyond the nation-state. While the present article shares much with this literature, particularly with regard to the move towards forms of statehood which exhibit a greater capacity to incorporate and manage multiple identities, it suggests that the territorial state remains an important level of analysis for tracking contemporary transformations. In particular, I argue that the questions of legitimacy and universality with which the modern state has historically grappled remain pertinent, at least in terms of contemporary Northern Ireland. No doubt the centrality of these questions in terms of the conflict in the north of Ireland plays a role here, suggesting that such issues may be especially salient in the case of intra-state conflicts.

This element of the analysis presented here has been made possible by the focus on the concept of state universality. Given that the profound relationship between nation and sovereignty in modern political thought has posed difficulties in terms of conceptualising forms of post-national or non-national statehood (Keating 2003), approaching such transformations by examining the way in which universality is constructed may prove a useful strategy, allowing us to analyse the ways in which the state is represented as universal without reference to the people or the nation, or in ways which rearticulate the relationship between the state, the people and the nation. Indeed, while some contemporary accounts emphasise the fragmentation of the state and its forms of legitimacy as a core component to the capacity of contemporary sovereignty to incorporate and manage multiple identities, the analysis presented here indicates that it is precisely the way in which the universality of state is staged which allows us to conceptualise the GFA's capacity to include ‘both communities’.

In this regard, the GFA has been referred to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as Ireland's ‘end of history’ (Ruane 1999). Indeed there are reasons to suggest that the GFA represents, if not the Irish ‘end of history’, then perhaps the end of Irish political modernity. Throughout Irish modernity the themes of universality and identity have been played out in political struggles, as thinkers and activists from Wolfe Tone to Bernadette Devlin have sought to construct a politics which might transcend the sectarian categories associated with colonial governance and the post-colonial legacy (Byrne 2014). The contemporary NI state might be seen to reconcile the antinomy between sectarianism and universality, in that it founds state universality on the recognition of ‘both communities’. It is this reconciliation that suggests the GFA as a kind of synthesis which brings to a close 300 years of Irish political modernity. But it does so at the cost of appropriating universality for the state and, at the same time, unleashing the very identitarian logic which underpins sectarianism. In this sense, it seems to me that, rather than resolving it, the NI state poses in a new form the question of the relationship between identity, universality and the state. Responding to these questions will no doubt remain a key democratic challenge in coming years and decades.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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