Late last month, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Senator George Mitchell, and a host of local worthies gathered in Belfast to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the deal that brought to an end the 30 years of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” and established a power-sharing executive to govern the post-conflict society. The anniversary, and the high profile of its celebrants, has renewed debate about the Agreement’s achievements. Foremost, of course, is the achievement of peace, but the Agreement also set out to make that peace sustainable. The power-sharing executive that was established to achieve this end, based upon a localized and rather idiosyncratic electoral system, created a political culture that has pushed to the political margins those parties that made the greatest sacrifices to realize their dreams of peace. It was the leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) that did the most to negotiate an end to the 30 years of low-level war that left more than 3,500 dead by bringing to the negotiating table their more radical political cousins and the paramilitary groups with which some of them were associated. But, after the Agreement, it was the leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein who worked most effectively to fashion the new system of government, while drawing voters ever further from the traditional unionist and nationalist mainstream, promoting the dream of a shared future while positioning the other as an ongoing threat to that project, and benefitting from the electoral consequences. The political culture that was enabled by the Agreement built peace at the same time as it eviscerated the parties that had worked hardest to imagine and then to serve the common good, and rewarded those parties that insisted upon the continuing immediacy of danger.
As the celebrations recognize, a great deal has been achieved in the past 20 years, but also obvious is the failure of the Good Friday Agreement system—or at least the failure of those parties that currently control it. The power-sharing executive has been suspended since January 2017, when the DUP and Sinn Fein fell out over a botched renewable energy grant scheme. They remain at odds, with Sinn Fein now insisting on legislation to support the Irish language as a precondition for their participation in a new power-sharing government. The debate about the Irish language is something of a pretext; it allows both parties to mark out cultural political territory, and hence to shore up electoral support, while providing a mutually convenient excuse to sit out the difficulty of governing Northern Ireland through the likely introduction of same-sex marriage (against which the DUP campaigned) and the negotiations for Brexit (against which Sinn Fein campaigned). But this failure in local government is pushing the “peace dividend” even further into arrears. With the resolution of the Troubles, Northern Ireland has become exceptional for its social failings: The average house price and household disposable income are only half those of the UK; Protestant working-class boys face some of the worst social exclusion and the worst rates of educational underachievement in the UK; the province sustains some of the UK’s worst child poverty rates, the worst child health statistics in Europe, and the UK’s highest rate of suicide. It is not clear why, 20 years after the end of the Troubles, Northern Ireland is still in crisis. Some commentators link these failings to the traumatic effects of the conflict, or to the structures of the society that the conflict created. If these explanations ring true, then the stories that are told about that conflict should be understood as making either a positive or negative contribution to the public health of Northern Ireland and to its social pathology, in which the common good remains at the mercy of a zero-sum electoral culture and the histories that underwrite it. And so, as celebrations continue of 20 years of peace, the elephant in the room is the question of whether, and how, the political culture created by the Agreement can overcome the tit-for-tat that passes for political debate, and the what-about-ery that passes for historical knowledge. Most guns are off the streets (though decommissioning is more of a metaphor than a fact). But history and memory continue to be weaponized. 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, is it time for history to be decommissioned?
The question of whether controversial histories should be remembered or forgotten has been raised in an expanding scholarly literature that includes Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting (2016). It engages political scientists as much as it does public historians and cultural theorists, and has been highlighted in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, which describes the formation and condition of public remembering and the less or more official cultures of memorialization in such contexts as the United States, Germany, Russia, and China. The problem is obviously complex, and the solutions necessarily relative. In some contexts, a tradition of remembering is giving way to a new preference to forget. The recent controversy that centered upon century-old Confederate monuments in and far beyond the Southern states has highlighted how difficult is the task of forgetting—and how public memory may provide new contexts for the interpretation of these monuments, be energized by new ideologies as a consequence of more recent political debates, and nuance what might once have been an uncritical appreciation of the past. In other contexts, an established preference to forget the past has given way to a more nuanced appropriation of its legacy. Since 1945, influential opinion formers in Western and Central Europe attempted to persuade their audiences to reject their nations’ controversial pasts, but this rejection has been nuanced in new debates about the impact of immigration, as Douglas Murray’s work on The Strange Death of Europe (2017) indicates, and as recent political changes in Austria, Germany and Italy, and the broader resurgence of the Right across Europe, each attest. These political turns—both toward and away from controversial pasts—have been balanced by the election of the new French President, Emmanuel Macron, a banker who as an academic spent time thinking through issues of contested history and controversial memory—not least by means of editing Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, for which he is thanked in the book’s preface. We are all familiar with George Santayana’s worry that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But, across Europe and the United States of America, those who remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, too. Controversial pasts are another country, and we are stuck in its Hotel California: We can check out any time we like, but we can never leave.
The problem of controversial pasts is particularly acute in Northern Ireland, where historical narratives continue to be weaponized in the service of competing political and cultural agendas. Northern Ireland suffers from a surfeit of memory, formed by beguiling images, displayed as gable-end murals and performed in popular culture. But it also suffers from an excess of history. Year on year, documents released under the 30-year rule provide new glimpses into the chaos and maleficence of the Troubles, and the opportunity for a generation that never experienced the horror of prolonged low-level warfare to engage as primary actors with its events. Yet popular memory and documentary history may be more alike that we might expect, for history and memory exist as overlapping and mutually influencing spheres, and neither are they untouched by the changing political contexts in which they are constructed, articulated, and received. For these mythological interpretations of controversial histories become subservient to current political realities: There are reasons in contemporary politics why credit for the ending of conflict is being given the leaders of Sinn Fein rather than to John Hume, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the now electorally marginal SDLP, whose painstaking work brought the more radical republican party to the table, as Maurice Fitzpatrick’s new book illustrates. But schools and public institutions are unable to dispel these grand reconstructions, through which the concerns of the present powerfully shape the representation of the past. Students may leave school programs with a mythological and often basically factually suspect interpretation of events in which their parents and grandparents may have been actors: The teaching of the Troubles in local schools is not dispelling the widely circulating explanatory frames through which a complex and sometimes chaotic conflict has become reducible to the zero-sum dynamic of the continuing political crisis in the power-sharing executive at Stormont, in which memory and history have become subservient to party political ambitions.
Of course, the politicization of history and memory represents both a challenge and an opportunity for historians. In other contexts, historians may struggle to demonstrate the social relevance and impact of their work. The challenge for historians of Northern Ireland is to prevent discussions of the past from making the wrong kind of impact, from becoming reducible to sectional interests or the goals of party-political propaganda. Politicians are worried about this, too—though perhaps for different reasons. Several of Northern Ireland’s political parties have adopted policies on how history should be researched and taught. The 2017 manifesto of the Ulster Unionist Party, for example, indicated its commitment to “not shy away from tackling the toxic legacy of the past,” while promising that “we will not tolerate the rewriting of history.” These commitments were not balanced by any discussion of academic freedom and did not seem to recognize that the expanding research base, provided by the ongoing release of new documents under the 30-year rule, does often require the revision of existing conclusions. This manifesto claim also ignores the fact that historical writing is never neutral, and nor should it be. Politicians are promoting the ideal of value-free historical enquiry and imagining that some kind of transcendent truth about the past could be politically established and could eradicate contested memory. In so doing, politicians who rightly worry about the subservience of historical writing to wider cultural or political agendas are undermining their own ends. Why should politicians not rather encourage historians to recognize and to be open about their political or cultural presuppositions—if only to allow their readers to say, “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?” One reason why history is contested is because of this idealization of transcendent truth—because historical narratives are thought to offer redemption or damnation, to provide a moral prism through which we may peer through the troubled, chaotic, unsystematic, conflicted, mundane, and endlessly disappointing character of human existence to identify villains and victims and to populate the past in a moral diorama. But this is another kind of work—for now we see through a glass, darkly—and history doesn’t have the tools for the job.
So can history be decommissioned? Perhaps. One approach may be to remember that history writing is necessarily interpretive. It is a meme in modern theory, popularized by Hayden White, as well as a truism in Calvinist epistemology, following the logic of Cornelius Van Til, that there is no such thing as a “brute fact.” And as there are no brute facts, so there can be no neutral observers of these facts. Every effort to explain—to frame an explanation, to solicit data for that explanation, to adopt a mode of argument for that explanation—is loaded with the baggage of political, cultural, and other kinds of presuppositions. And, if there are no brute facts and no neutral observers of brute facts, there may be much less of a distinction between history and memory than we often assume. While the former may pay more attention to method and other professional standards, history and memory are both narratives about the past. Their relationship may sometimes be contested, but it is never zero-sum, if only because history writing is never hermetically sealed from the practice of memory.
History may be decommissioned when its limits are better known. Historical work allows us to identify the problem. It reminds us that historical narratives, like memory, exist in many drafts, as Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) reveals. It provides us with the analytical tools by means of which we can pursue the semiotic archaeology of conflict, disentangling the images, individuals, and incidents that have driven violence and illustrating their change across time. It can help us understand why certain sets of images may retain their compelling and intoxicating power, identifying the mythology of the past that creates stories that become so thoroughly understood that they can assume the bright clarity of transcendent truth.
But history has no redemptive power in addressing the “evils” of the past, which the cover of the recent issue of Foreign Policy describes. History offers no absolution. It makes no promise for the future. It may establish a record of responsibility and guilt, but it defies every effort to establish or resolve the moral binary that supports the zero-sum politics haunting Northern Ireland’s present political crisis, where the perennial temptation is to cast the first historical stone. History may be decommissioned when we remember what it is and where its limits lie. Better historical writing will not save us. Historians will not provide the jury on judgement day.
And so, 20 years after the end of the Troubles, the carefully calibrated considerations of professional historians can make little impact upon popular constructions of history, in which a sequence of powerful images retain a compelling, even visceral, explanatory power. The province remains haunted by the history and memory that has been weaponized in the pursuit of sectional interests. But, representing contested legacies, both history and memory may be the blind guiding the blind. History, like memory, is fraught with the values and preferences of its practitioners. We may not be able to measure the significance for his policies of the fact that Macron edited Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, or whether better theoretical reflection on our habits of memorialization can contribute to a less contested culture. But, in Northern Ireland, history and memory may wait to be decommissioned; for, if the contested past is our Hotel California, we must expect some to write to remember, and others to write to forget.