Towards Division Not Peace - Introduction

Introduction
The term "peace process" is increasingly becoming a misnomer to describe developments in Northern Ireland. The political process, which grew out of the peace process, is in almost permanent crisis.

Whether or not the Assembly stays in place and the sectarian politicians stay united around the Executive table the underlying process is not towards unity or peace but towards division and conflict. The warning we gave a few years ago that what was beginning to develop could more accurately be described as a "repartition process" than a "peace process" has unfortunately been confirmed.

We are now in a new situation in the north. It is very different from what existed in the 1970s and even the 1980s. It is also in the context of a very different world situation. Those who examine current events through the distorting spectrum of an old political perspective that they learned ten or twenty years ago will get very little right.

A perspective is not a blueprint but a guide to action. And in order to be able to intervene in a situation the first and absolutely fundamental prerequisite is that we understand and analyse correctly what is taking place. Only then can we draw correct conclusions and put forward correct slogans.

The first task of this pamphlet is therefore to explain this changed situation and to define the nature of the current conflict. It is not to try to answer the unanswerable; will the Assembly survive? And for how long? Will the IRA hand over all their weapons? etc. Rather it is to clarify the underlying processes, to determine the main direction of events and to explain the real nature of the forces involved.

When the peace process began journalists and academics produced a forest of literature confidently describing this as the "endgame". This was no more accurate than the far blown claim made just a few years earlier by Francis Fukiyama that the collapse of Stalinism marked the "end of history".

The Socialist Party countered the illusions that were being sown in the peace process, explaining that there could be no lasting solution on the basis of capitalism. The form of the conflict could be changed, there could be interludes brought about by war weariness and exhaustion, above all the development of the class struggle could cut across nationalism and sectarianism for a whole period. But, so long as capitalism remained, the underlying problem and with it the basis for ongoing sectarian conflict would remain also.

Against the background of Drumcree, Holy Cross and the nightly battles in the so called "interface" areas there are as few takers now for the "endgame" idea as there are for Fukiyama's view that history has ended. The peace process marked the end of the Troubles in the form they had taken for more than two decades. It did not, however, mark the end of the conflict but rather the start of a new and potentially even more tumultuous and dangerous chapter.

A particularly sectarian phase has opened. This has been a setback for the working class. The ideas of class unity and socialism have been thrown back. Sectarian ideas are now dominant especially in the working class areas. It has been an ideological as well as a physical setback. In terms of an explanation and an understanding of what is taking place there has been a triumph of the irrational over the rational. Truth and reality has been clouded in the sectarian dust storm blown up by both unionism and republicanism.

The best way to clear this ideological haze is to examine how this phase of the conflict developed and how it differs from what went before. By drawing an outline of events since the start of the Troubles in 1968 we can see where the contours of the current conflict have bent away from the past outlines. By seeing the changes we can identify more clearly the real basis of what is now taking place and the direction in which it is headed.