Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen

9. When Democracy Complicates Peace: How Democratic Contingencies Affect Negotiated Settlements

Chapter 9 When Democracy Complicates Peace How Democratic Contingencies Affect Negotiated Settlements Courtney Jung In the 1970s, the political conflicts in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East were widely viewed as among the world’s most intractable .1 Based on profound racial, ethnic, or religious animosities, they were reinforced by cultural and economic differences and solidified by decades of more-or-less violent confrontation. They were often held out as paradigms of “divided” societies, and there seemed little chance of a transition to democratic arrangements in any of them. Whether one focused on the players contending for power, the histories of the conflicts, or the capacities of outsiders to influence events, the prospects for negotiated settlements seemed dim. During the 1990s, however, the paths of these three conflicts diverged quite dramatically. South Africa moved through a comparatively peaceful four-year transition to majority rule in a unitary state. Democratic elections in 1994, 1999, and 2004 put the African National Congress securely in power without civil war, economic collapse, or catastrophic white exodus. The continuing economic and social challenges are enormous, with a third of the population unemployed and one in nine infected by the HIV virus. But by most measures South Africa has weathered the transition well. Democracy may not yet be entrenched, but it seems at least to have a fighting chance. Northern Ireland has also made important advances since real negotiations began in 1996. Both Republicans and Loyalists committed to cease fires that have held, and most serious violence has abated sufficiently so that people have started to think peace a realistic possibility. In 1998 the 246 Shapiro_pp203-278 7/17/07 3:14 PM Page 246 two sides signed an agreement that majorities of both Catholics and Protestants supported. Yet the future of the Good Friday Agreement remains precarious. The power-sharing government was repeatedly suspended by Westminster, leading to the re-imposition of direct rule in October 2002. Whether the paramilitary groups will disband and the Executive and Assembly will be revived was still an open question in 2005. Establishing peace between the Palestinians and Israelis has been even more elusive. There have been some major turning points in the ArabIsraeli conflict, and periods of great optimism, most notably following the negotiation of the Camp David Accords, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979, and the Palestinian-Israeli negotiation of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995. These opened windows of opportunity. However, the principals have often been either unable or unwilling to seize the opportunities that emerged when one side made concessions. In 1998, Netanyahu rendered Arafat’s concessions in the Wye Accord useless when he unilaterally suspended implementation of the agreement. Arafat refused Ehud Barak’s concessions at Camp David II in 2000. Backtracking and disappointing failure have been so frequent that the Israeli peace process often seems ritualistic and pointless. It continues to vindicate the 1970s diagnosis by going nowhere—if often by Byzantine routes at enormous human and economic cost. How can we explain these divergent outcomes? Why were some violent conflicts more amenable to solution than others? Why did three situations that seemed similarly resistant to transformation take such different paths during the 1990s? This chapter focuses attention on the ways in which settlements in South Africa, Israel, and Northern Ireland have been both facilitated and constrained by the contingencies inherent in the flawed democratic settings that have structured these peace processes. Over the course of the 1990s, opposition groups re-framed their struggles as demands for democratic government, parties were able to remain in negotiations only so long as they could maintain popular support, and settlements came to depend more on installing “democracy” than on merely achieving “peace.”2 Democracy however, is neither a neutral bargaining context, nor a neutral goal. The pseudo-democratic contexts in which contemporary peace processes take place offer opportunities and constraints that do not exist in other bargaining situations, and are likely to be important to a number of contemporary and future negotiation processes. Specifically, pseudo-democratic settings have distinct implications, and When Democracy Complicates Peace 247 Shapiro_pp203-278 7/17/07 3:14 PM Page 247 operate in distinct ways, in each of the three phases of the peace process: initiation, negotiation, and implementation. Such settings may make initiation easier, I argue, but they tip the scales during negotiations, and they make implementation harder. In Section 1, I examine the...