The British-Irish Council and Devolution
by Vernon Bogdanor
Government & Opposition 34 (1999);287-98. (Published by London School of Economics and Political Science)
The British-Irish Council and the Nordic Council
The British-Irish Council is modelled in part on the Nordic Council whose members are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, together with three autonomous areas - the Faeroes and Greenland which are part of Denmark and the Aaland Islands which are part of Finland. The Nordic Council has achieved a considerable degree of integration but, by contrast, with the European Union, has not impinged upon the sovereignty of its members. The British-Irish Council will share with the Nordic Council a feature unusual if not unique amongst international bodies in not being composed exclusively of sovereign states. In the case of the Nordic Council, however, the autonomous regions do not participate in the same manner as the sovereign states and do not enjoy full voting rights. Nevertheless, they enjoy a great deal of influence as the member states feel a sense of obligation towards them. The presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers is held only by the member states, but the presidency of the Nordic Council itself, which is an interparliamentary body, rotates annually and so a member from one of the autonomous areas holds the presidency in three years out of eight. It is not yet clear whether the British-Irish Council will operate in a similar manner with annual rotation of the presidency among its eight members or whether the presidency will remain the prerogative of the two member states.
The contrasts between the Nordic Council and the British-Irish council seem, in any case, rather more important than the similarities. The success of the Nordic Council results from long standing common cultural ties, a consensus built up around a broadly social democratic ideology, and a skill at defusing tensions. These are not qualities which have been very evident in Northern Ireland.
The Nordic Council began as an informal body of parliamentarians in 1952. The Council of Ministers was not formed until 1971. The urge to co-operate thus originated with parliamentarians, representatives of the people. With the British-Irish Council, by contrast, co-operation is beginning at executive level and will, it is hoped, be followed later by interparliamentary co-operation. This symbolizes an important difference. The Nordic Council was the product of a consensus. Conflicts between the various member states had been resolved some time before it was established. The British-Irish Council, by contrast, hopes to create a consensus not only amongst legislators, but also amongst peoples, so as to resolve a long historical and ongoing conflict. Moreover, a main aim of the Nordic Council has been international rather than domestic - to increase the influence of the Nordic countries in the world. The main aim of the British-Irish Council, by contrast, is likely to be concerned with securing and bolstering the settlement embodied in the Belfast Agreement.
Further, the composition of the two Councils and the relative weight of
the devolved bodies within them are quite different. Five of the eight members
of the Nordic Council are sovereign states of not dissimilar size. Only
two out of the eight members of the British-Irish Council, however, are
sovereign states, and one of them has a population of 56 million, while
the other has a population of less than four million. The Nordic Council,
moreover, began as a body comprising just the sovereign states. The autonomous
areas joined later, the Faeroes and the Aaland Islands in 1970 and Greenland
in 1974. The Faeroes and Greenland return just two members each out of 179
to the Danish parliament, while the Aaland Islands return just one member
out of 200 in the Finnish parliament. The devolved areas of the United Kingdom,
by contrast, return 20 per cent - 130 out of 659 - of the Members of Parliament,
and have considerable weight in the British political system. They are,
moreover, very different areas, comprising one nation, Scotland, which from
1999, will have legislative control over its domestic affairs, another nation,
Wales, which from 1999, will, have control over secondary legislation affecting
its domestic affairs and a divided province, Northern Ireland, which does
not conceive of itself as a nation at all. |
