Peace agreements are incompatible with national-populism

For anyone who has been paying attention, it should be no surprise that detailed and nevertheless fragile peace agreements that were reached in the 1990s are today in danger because of the rhetoric, the actions and the events unleashed by national-populist forces. Brexit threatens the results of the Good Friday agreement reached almost twenty years ago after decades of violence in Northern Ireland. That agreement was not perfect, it was complex and multilateral. It had even some disturbing elements, like the obligation to "share" a government between religious parties, accepting de facto the "tagging" of organizations and voters, instead of promoting that one day the province could be dominated by a secular multicultural political force or several of them. More importantly, the agreement was made possible by the existence of the European Union, which facilitated a legal and economic framework that produced the dilution of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as it happend for example between Spain and Portugal (I still laugh when someone wants to seem modern by asking for an Iberian federation -we already have it! It's called European Union). The two parts of the island can share today a common economic and trading area and even an electricity system. Each part probably believes that it is sovereign, but the border disappeared twenty years ago, which means that even unconsciously they have been sharing the same territory. And it has been good for them, as the island has probably lived through the most prosperous and peaceful period of its contemporary history. Now Brexit threatens this, because British voters by a small margin decided to leave the EU in a simplistic referendum by a very small majority, even if the voters in the Northern Ireland province voted to remain, as they voted in favor of the Good Friday agreement almost twenty years ago together with the voters of the Republic of Ireland. That was a complex and patient agreement, the result of multilateral negotiations. The extremists in the British conservative party and the extremists among the Northern Irish unionists have a hard time trying to make compatible Brexit with the Good Friday Agreement. In fact, they are incompatible, and probably the only solution is either to acknowledge that Brexit as it has been imagined by its proponents is impossible, or to construct a special regime in Northern Ireland without saying it to save the face of the Unionist and the British government. In the Middle East, the Oslo peace accords were also fragile and imperfect. In a perfect world, instead of a two state solution we would have a plurinational federal state as suggested by the late historian Tony Judt. But it was also a multilateral agreement that laid the foundation of future peace negotiations. Donald Trump does not want any of it and is willing to sacrifice decades of good will and slow progress to demonstrate that his rhetoric must prevail. Our world is interconnected and the decisions of British or American voters have effects on third parties. But a characteristic of national-populists is that they do not have time for complex agreements or institutional constraints. The problem is that some of these constraints keep the world in relative peace.