More than a decade on from the Belfast agreement, the sectarian 'force field' of antagonism in Northern Ireland remained as strong as ever. The Belfast agreement restricts north-south collaboration to twelve specified policy domains in an annexe, though the main body of the text speaks of 'at least' six implementation bodies and six areas of policy cooperation. To make the 'external' arrangements work, 'internal' governance of Northern Ireland must place a premium on dialogue and deliberation across sectarian boundaries. This can best be done through a requirement to reach cross-communal majorities on executive formation and dissolution. To implement the constitutional changes, new legislation would be required substantially amending the Northern Ireland Act 1998, passed at Westminster to implement the agreement, and the Northern Ireland Act 2006, which paved the way for renewed devolution.

On his first full day in office as US President in January 2009, Barack Obama appointed the chair of the talks leading to the 1998 Belfast agreement, George Mitchell, as his Middle East envoy. Anticipating the decision, the Washington Post reported that the former Senate majority leader was 'highly regarded as a negotiator for his work in the successful Northern Ireland peace process'. As the former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia complained, the US administration interpreted the Goldstone report, scrupulously framed by international standards of human rights and humanitarian law, as an obstacle to progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli State had pre-empted Obama's inauguration with the invasion of Gaza, committing war crimes, echoed by its enemy Hamas, according to a 575-page report for the United Nations Human Rights Council by a distinguished team led by Justice Richard Goldstone.

In his 1990 survey of literature on the Northern Ireland conflict, John Whyte suggested that, in proportion to its size, the region represented 'the most heavily researched area on earth'. He estimated that some 7,000 books and articles might have been written on the Northern Ireland conflict. The essentialist conception of the Northern Ireland 'problem' which has predominated within the British State dovetails neatly with the argument of those who would offer consociationalism as the appropriate political 'solution'. Moreover, essentialism lends itself to an excessive readiness to hand over power to the very ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, taken to be merely the passive representatives of ethnic 'communities', whose protagonism has driven the conflict itself. Ethnic protagonism in the name of identity came to be articulated in terms of the 'politics of recognition'. 'Nationalist politics' is indeed incurious at best about working 'across communities'.

This chapter explores how official discourse, in London and Dublin, came over time to define the Northern Ireland 'problem'. It also explores how only certain solutions were conceivable, notably excluding those based on universal norms, even if these were to prove unsustainable or, at best, sub-optimal. The stereotypical conceptual grid applied to Northern Ireland prevented the logical conclusion, of flexible power-sharing arrangements, based on equal citizens rather than 'communities' as the social unit, from being drawn. Within the stereotyped perspective, of course, the British State saw itself as passive and reactive, rather than its interventions framing concrete outcomes in Northern Ireland. James Callaghan as Home Secretary had recognised that British military intervention would have political implications and he commissioned contingency plans for direct rule as early as the winter of 1968.

At their summit on the western Balkans in Thessaloniki in June 2003, European Union (EU) leaders declared: 'Fragmentation and divisions along ethnic lines are incompatible with the European perspective, which should act as a catalyst for addressing problems within the region'. This chapter is based on secondary sources on Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H). In B-H an amoral approach was adopted, notably by the UK, based on minimising intervention, particularly by refusing to commit troops to a peace-enforcing role. B-H might seem a more successful power-sharing case than Northern Ireland, in as much as the State institutions, however dysfunctional, have at least been in being ever since the Dayton accords. In Macedonia importantly, interethnic dialogue after the outbreak of civil conflict could be presented instead, as Brussels was keen to do, as an integral part of the path to eventual EU membership, via an Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA).

Substantial claims made by British ministers for the achievements of the Belfast agreement, notably had 'solved' Northern Ireland's constitutional crisis. The first serious attempt to re-establish power-sharing after the 'rolling devolution' initiative was essayed by Peter Brooke, as soon as he became Northern Ireland's Secretary in July 1989. Following the April election, and with a new Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, talks were initiated once more. But immediately the difficulties were apparent. Four years on from the Belfast agreement, the then Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, spoke of 'looking beyond the agreement' and of 'building a society free from the burden of history and liberated from the curse of sectarianism'. Josias Cunningham concludes his three-decades-long survey of UK Government policy on Northern Ireland by denying that the agreement would herald a 'post-national' politics in which ideas of 'nation, state and identity' were critically interrogated.