Negotiating the Northern Ireland Problem: Track One or Track Two Diplomacy?

THE RECENT POLITICAL HISTORY OF NORTHERN IRELAND HAS been punctuated by arrivals and departures as successive secretaries of state have attempted to impose their personalities on an intractable problem through a series of (failed) initiatives. The latest exercise has been under way since the beginning of 1990 and is closely identified with the diplomatic skills exerted by the present Secretary of State, Mr Peter Brooke. In what has been described as ‘potentially the most significant political discussions in all of Ireland since the treaty of 1921’, Mr Brooke has embarked on a voyage which could transcend in importance the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. The purpose of this article is to put that voyage into some sort of context by suggesting that rather than concentrate solely on the ‘high’ politics of political negotiation, attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms which allow negotiations to proceed. For that reason we will look at the relative merits — and the complementarity — of ‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’ diplomacy.

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‘HIGH POLITICS’ AND THE ‘NEW POLITICAL HISTORY’

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x10000129 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 53 (2) ◽

pp. 453-475 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

DAVID M. CRAIG

Keyword(s):

Political History ◽

History Of Ideas ◽

The Political ◽

Political Behaviour ◽

Political World ◽

History Of ◽

Michael Oakeshott ◽

1960S And 1970S ◽

The 1960S ◽

High Politics

ABSTRACTRecent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.

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From Loyal Soldiers to Political Spokespersons : a Political History of a Loyalist Paramilitary Group in Northern Ireland

Études irlandaises ◽

10.3406/irlan.1996.1298 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 165-182 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

James White McAuley

Keyword(s):

Northern Ireland ◽

Political History ◽

History Of

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The Buccleuch Marriage Contract: An Unknown Episode in Scottish Politics

Albion A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies ◽

10.2307/4050875 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 395-418

Author(s):

Maurice Lee

Keyword(s):

Political History ◽

The Political ◽

Scottish Parliament ◽

Secretary Of State ◽

Principal Source ◽

Marriage Contract ◽

History Of ◽

Lord Chancellor ◽

Act One ◽

Scottish Politics

On October 5, 1663, the Scottish Parliament took an action unique in its long and variegated history. It ratified a marriage contract between two of the king's subjects. Not ordinary subjects, to be sure—they were the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest bastard, a lad of fourteen, and Anna Scott, countess of Buccleuch, aged twelve, who had been married the previous April. Persuading Parliament to ratify this contract was potentially a very tricky business; the king entrusted the handling of it to the earl of Lauderdale, the secretary of state, normally resident in Whitehall, who had been sent to Scotland to manage this session of Parliament. The ratification was a private act, one of a large number passed at each session of the Scottish Parliament in favor of private individuals and corporations: towns, universities, etc. Because it was a private act Osmund Airy, the editor of the Lauderdale papers, our principal source for the day-to-day doings of this Parliament, ignored it in making his selection from the vast Lauderdale correspondence. So the episode has gone completely unnoticed by historians. This is a pity, not only because the story of the marriage contract and its ratification is fascinating in itself, but also because it was important for Lauderdale's political future. Lauderdale's success in getting the ratification passed without backlash helped to convince King Charles that he was the man to manage Scottish business from now on.The political history of Restoration Scotland has been largely neglected by historians. Lauderdale was the dominant figure for most of Charles's reign, but it was some years before he achieved that eminence. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, until his fall in 1667, was Charles's principal adviser for all of his three kingdoms, a fact that Lauderdale resented but had to live with. Clarendon did not like Lauderdale, who, he wrote, had been a leader of the Covenanters' rebellion “when he was scarce of age, and prosecuted it to the end with the most eminent fierceness and animosity.”

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