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ABSTRACT
On May 8, 2007, a power-sharing executive was constituted in Northern Ireland. Although the fledgling government does not signal that harmony is likely to prevail in the province, it indicates that politics will be practiced in the North by politicians who fought one another to a draw for more than a decade in which the end stages of the formal peace process played themselves out fitfully and relentlessly. This article identifies the strategy that Sinn Fein adopted to resolve the deadly conflict in the North and suggests that by following that game plan to its logical conclusion and by responding to the demands made by its chief foe, the Democratic Unionist party, Sinn Fein left that party with no credible argument with which to sustain its objection to joining a power-sharing government. It conjectures that only a soothsayer can predict with any degree of certitude whether the ultimate goals of the unionists or the nationalists will be realized. Finally, it concludes that the peace process in Northern Ireland provides a model for helping to resolve historic conflicts irrespective of their kind, cause, and duration.
Notes
Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1981).
Ibid., 16.
Ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Edwina McMahon
Edwina McMahon was a long-time Senior Fellow of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and the Associate Editor of American Foreign Policy Interests until 2011.