Archipelago politics: A critically-informed hermeneutic approach to Northern Ireland's Belfast Agreement

Drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, I defend Northern Ireland's Belfast Agreement from the perspective of a critically-informed hermeneutics. This approach focuses upon the interpretive dimensions of political disputes, as well as clarifying how to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate interpretations. This approach is similar to the political philosophy of Michael Walzer, although Walzer's early work is not sensitive to the problems of deeply divided societies like Northern Ireland. Political developments on the British-Irish archipelago of islands have led the Northern Irish nationalists and the Ulster unionists to form different senses of national identity. Hence, they offer different answers to the question of whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or become part of the Republic of Ireland. The Northern Irish nationalists feel aggrieved due to their involuntary exclusion from an emerging Irish nation-state in the early twentieth century. The Ulster unionists can be divided into cultural unionists and liberal unionists, but both groups feel threatened by the prospect of being forced into a united Ireland. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 is an impressive archipelago-wide response to this set of grievances and insecurities. I focus upon the agreement's consociational and transnational aspects. It does not accommodate illegitimate accounts, but it does accommodate different nationalist and unionist interpretations of what it means to reside on the island of Ireland, different applications of the principle of national self-determination, and different aspirations concerning the future constitutional status of Northern Ireland. Depending upon the future efforts of Ulster unionists and Northern Irish nationalists, Northern Ireland may remain part of the British nation-state forever, or it may become part of the Irish nation-state. However, in either case, transnational institutions have been established that informally dilute the national sovereignty of both nation-states as a means of protecting the Ulster unionists and the Northern Irish nationalists.