The flexibility of Northern Ireland Unionists and Afrikaner Nationalists in comparative perspective

Paper presented at the conference 'Protestant Traditions and the Paths to Peace: Beyond the Legacies of Plantation', Global Irish Institute, University College, Dublin, 9 June 2009A common feature of comparisons of Northern Ireland and South Africa prior to South Africa's transition and the Northern Ireland peace process was the siege mentality of the dominant communities in the two societies. The paper examines two attempts to analyse this in greater depth that were published before the major changes of the 1990s: Michael McDonald's Children of Wrath and Donald Akenson's God's Peoples. It reviews their arguments in the light of the current situation in both Northern Ireland and South Africa. Consideration is then given to how the discourse on the character of both communities changed in the course of the 1990s and to the comparisons that changing circumstances gave rise to, while a striking instance of the recent use of the older comparison of the Unionists and Afrikaner nationalists is noted and discussed. The paper concludes by asking whether the notion of a siege mentality still has any current applicability in these two casesNot applicabl