Northern Ireland

Abstract

In 1998, Northern Ireland became the poster child for international intervention, when the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (GFA) was signed, bringing the 30-year violent conflict to an end. While the UN was not involved in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, the EU heralded the GFA as an example of the EU’s ameliorating role. It was observed that ‘without the embedding of both states in the wider system of European integration and without the models of politics offered by the EU, it is unlikely that both states and other political actors could have found the political capacity and the institutional models to craft the Good Friday Agreement’ (Laffan, 2003, p. 14). Indeed, in 1998, Northern Ireland was the only example of a successful peace process within the EU, for which the EU took some credit.