Neal G. Jesse

Resolving Nationalist Conflicts: Promoting Overlapping Identities and Pooling Sovereignty—The 1998 Northern Irish Peace Agreement

Nationalist and ethnic conflicts are a continuing source of tension in the post–Cold War period. The underlying factors affecting such conflicts are threat perception, ethnic security dilemmas, and lack of trust between nationalist/ethnic groups. The challenge is to find solutions to these conflicts. International institutions can establish trust and reduce the ethnic security dilemma by providing multiple forums of representation, promoting overlapping identities, and pooling sovereignty. Pooling sovereignty across a number of international representative bodies leads to increased access to governmental policymaking, with each party having a stake in government, and leads to a reduction in political tension and conflict. Thus, international parliamentary institutions may provide a solution to these conflicts. The British-Irish Peace Agreement (Good Friday Agreement) of 1998 is examined as an illustration of this argument.

Choosing to go it alone : Irish neutrality in theoretical and comparative perspective

Realist and liberal paradigms of foreign policy analysis offer different views of the important policy stance of neutrality. Realism explains a neutral stance as the rational calculation of a small state’s interests in the state-centered, unfriendly, self-help environment. Liberalism argues that international norms and internal dynamics lead nations to seek and maintain neutrality. This article explores the neutral foreign policy stance of the Republic of Ireland from 1938 to the present in comparison to Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland. The Irish policy of neutrality differs from the other European neutrals in two important ways: it is unarmed neutrality and it is not impartial neutrality. I argue that domestic actors, public opinion, and governmental decision-making institutions provide an explanation for the continuing stance of neutrality. Thus, liberalism provides a better explanation for Irish neutrality than realism. The value of this study is that it illustrates in a comparative perspective the varying sources of neutrality in Europe and points to the continued usefulness of varied perspectives in understanding historical and contemporary foreign policy.

A Nested Game Approach to Political and Economic Liberalization in Democratizing States: The Case of South Korea

South Korea enjoyed high rates of economic growth until the mid-1990s. However in mid-1997 the country went into a severe economic crisis which ultimately resulted in a request for an IMF bailout. Leading up to the crisis, the government had embarked upon democratic liberalization but not much economic liberalization. This research explores why the government would lay the foundation for political reform without creating institutions capable of imposing economic reform on the politically powerful business sector. The absence of such institutions put the government in a position where it could not respond to the emerging economic crisis. The governments inability to act eroded its own position of power and governance. From this perspective, the governments inattention to economic reform appears irrational as it led to a weakening of its own position. We build a model of political and economic liberalization showing that the government was engaged in nested games (i.e., games in multiple arenas) with the political opposition, the labor unions, and the powerful business sector. We develop an argument that strong, antiliberal economic actors create incentive for the government in a democratizing state to refrain from economic liberalization, even while moving forward with democratic liberalization.

Contemporary Irish Neutrality: Still a Singular Stance

Neutrality is both a specific form of foreign policy and a little understood issue in international relations. Neutrality is also a relatively new concept, only as old as the current international order. The decline of empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ushered in the era of nation-states and their ideological complement, nationalism. The rise of nationalism has led to foreign policies directed by the governments of each nation-state in the name of protecting sovereignty, primarily by protecting the nation’s borders. Each state engages in the international order in an attempt to increase its main realist aim, security. While the modern form of neutrality traces back to Swiss neutrality in the sixteenth century, its current nationalist incarnation goes back only as far as the Concert of Europe (1815), the Hague Agreements (1907), and the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Since then, only a small number of states have pursued neutrality, most of which have been small European states—for example, Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland.1 The Republic of Ireland, too, belongs to the group of European neutrals, and has pursued neutrality since World War II. Ireland’s geographic isolation from the European continent—shielded by the bulk of the English mainland—provided it with a natural barricade from the last century of European conflict. In addition, Ireland’s lack of any true capability to project power beyond its shores,

Ireland and brexit: a roundtable

ABSTRACT:A panel of five historians and political scientists, from the United States, Ireland, and Britain respond to questions regarding Brexit vote of the United Kingdom in June 2016 and historic and present-day attitudes toward the European Union (EU) in Britain and Ireland. The authors consider regional variations in attitudes toward the EU within both countries. They offer commentary on the implications of the Brexit vote on future British-Irish relations, particularly with regard to the nature of the land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the future. The article closes with a discussion of how the nature of nation-states has been called into question by the vote, requiring that political actors and nations reconcile states and multi-state entities with nations in a new context.

Ireland Through European Eyes: Western Europe, The EEC and Ireland, 1945–1973 ed. by Mervyn O'Driscoll, Dermot Keogh, and Jérôme aan de Wiel (review)

Accept the only consolation they can offer, their memories of you, invulnerable to time. Take what you can see and hear, abandon touch, breath on skin. No power of longing can restore this earthly gift. Do not be afraid then— Stay; let them cluster at the hearth, about your table. Grave or whimsical, out of their element, do not ask of them what they did not ask to lose: weight, coherence. Sit hear them out. They have come all this way only to render an account. As the light grows cold, stay. Do not turn your back on their entreaty; their clamorous hunger.

Does the transfer of votes really matter

This article examines the impact of the transfer of votes in the Single Transferable Vote (STV) and Alternative Vote (AV) electoral systems in the context of electoral reform. Specifically, it investigates Irish and Australian elections to answer two questions: how often is a transfer of votes needed for a candidate to secure a seat and how often does the transfer of votes produce a ‘winning’ candidate who was not a leading candidate before the transfer? The paper reaches two conclusions. First, the transfer of votes contributes to the election of the overwhelming majority of candidates in STV, but not in AV. Second, the greater the number of seats in a district, the greater the likelihood that the transfer of votes will push a trailing candidate into office at the expense of a leading candidate. Thus, the larger the district magnitude, the greater mechanical effect of the transfer upon the outcome of an election.