"It is now clear that European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict, to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution." Thus John Hume spoke in Oslo last week adding further to the entirely agreeable but largely mythic theories of conflict resolution.
During the entire Peace Process, two other regions were comparably held up as examples of how tribal conflict could be settled, and they were as spurious as John Hume's citation of Europe's conflict resolution; they were Israel/Palestine and South Africa. In the case of the former, the 1993 Yitzhak Rabin-Yasser Arafat deal was heralded as the beginning of a new era of peace, as was the election in South Africa of Nelson Mandela.
Tactical expedient
Neither was an example of conflict resolution. In Israel, the conflict has merely been altered in appearance, not resolved; and in South Africa, the black majority simply won. True, its leaders have allowed temporary concessions to the defeated, largely because white skills are still needed, but this is merely a tactical expedient; the white man is probably doomed in South Africa in the long-term. Hundreds of white farmers are being murdered every year, and places like Pretoria and Johannesburg are already extremely dangerous places for whites, whose departure from those cities will turn one day into a mass-exodus. This is not conflict resolution. This is victory.
We need not discuss Israel any more; the day of the PLO is passed, and we have entered the era of suicide-bombers of Hamas and the suicide-settlers of Zion. The conflict there has deepened. But what about Europe? Surely there we find the greatest example ever of conflict resolution?
We do not. What we actually find is the classic example of total victory followed by ethnic cleansing of the defeated people. No country this century has been subjected to a peace as Carthaginian as that experienced by Germany in 1945. Its cities were, without exception, smoking wastelands. Its leaders were rounded up and killed or imprisoned. It was quartered and governed separately by the four victor-powers. Its population was indoctrinated through a process of "de-Nazification". In the east, the people were subjected to a new form of totalitarianism, and in the west, no military activity of any kind was permitted. The navy, army and air force were outlawed, even as a vast exercise in land theft, murder and expulsions of the defeated people took place across Europe.
Truncated Germany
Thousands of helpless ethnic Germans were killed in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Romania. Millions more had their homes confiscated and they were despatched on foot to Germany, many perishing of hunger and disease on the way. Vast tracts of land were confiscated from old Germany, and the new Germany which emerged was truncated, castrated, and humiliated. Its capital was divided and decapitalised; a new capital was permitted in a dreary provincial town, and those few factories which had survived allied bombers were dismantled and seized as reparations.
No German child growing up in the 1950s could be in any doubt how the war had turned out. The country was garrisoned by troops of a dozen countries, one of which, the USA, was also garrisoning much of Europe, protecting it from Soviet aggression as well as guarding its own interests there. It was in these extraordinary circumstances, and ones which are unlikely to be replicated anywhere else, that the plant of Franco-German accord took root.
All border disputes had been settled in the interests of Germany's enemies; all population rivalries had been resolved by the expulsion of Germans; all military possibilities were extinguished by the dissolution of the German armed forces; all political possibilities were defined by an essentially foreigndrafted German constitution. Germany had become a blank piece of paper on which the allies could draw almost whatever design they wanted, one of which was its economic reconstruction by means of the Marshall Plan.
Europe is a fiction
Moreover, the Europe in which France and Germany have made their peace is not a European confection, but an American one. Even today, Europe does not guard Europe, because Europe cannot guard Europe. The US does. Europe is a fiction, incapable of implementing any purely European defence policy at its boundaries, never mind beyond them. European political and military will is a posturing pretence which would fall apart without the magnetism of the US-dominated alliance called NATO.
So what lessons can be learnt from the Franco-German experience for Northern Ireland? Well, that if there were a war in which one side were totally victorious; if the two populations were then ruthlessly separated by murder and deportation; if large amounts of land were confiscated by the victors from the vanquished; if the defeated military leaders were seized, shot or hanged; if a vast standing army of occupation by a superpower were garrisoned there; if the entire school-population were put through a process of indoctrination - yes, well maybe then there might indeed be another example of conflict resolution. Though wasn't something similar tried in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries?