 the invitation into the Korean Embassy for Citizens and Organizing the Event. I think one of the – any of us that have been involved in the Northern Ireland sort of issue as practitioners, as watchers, as analysts, as people just citizens of the island looking at it. Warnings have been very striking. I suppose two things have struck me. One is the failure of prediction is not simply a Korean lacking in world affairs. I mean, how many headlines were written in the summer of 1994 were saying the peace process was over. I was, for my sins, teaching Soviet politics in the autumn of 1991 and happily bought a great new textbook by Gordon Smith in the UK, The Politics of the Soviet Union. President Tense, which was a little bit delayed in the printer, so came out in November 1991, and obviously had a rather short history life before it became a work of history in its own right. So prediction is a perilous business. But I agree with you that there's always something to be learned by comparison, even from the most unlikely of cases. And obviously the Irish and Korean cases have huge differences in terms of the nature of the border being sealed, the nuclear issue, the interest of superpowers compared to the – for good or ill, the lack of interest of superpowers in most cases through Irish sort of contemporary history. And one of the reasons for setting up the institution, DCU, was to capture the interest there was in the Irish case, but also recognising that the Irish Academy and probably Irish writers more generally, we tend to write for ourselves. You know, those of you from Ireland in the audience, think of any book in the peace process that you could hand in heart, hand over to one of our Korean visitors who just arrived on the island of Ireland, and that they could read without referring to ten other books to find out who the names are that get dropped in, the historical context that gets dropped in. So we don't tend to write for an international audience. Maybe as a small country that's understandable, but it does make the Irish case, despite the huge level of interest that there is in it. In just over the last two years, we've literally hosted people from Armenia to Zimbabwe, and probably every letter of the alphabet in between, doing the rounds of people in Ireland who might say, well, what in this might be of interest? Because from the outside world's perspective, it is a successful peace process. There was conflict, there was very moderate levels of conflict by international standards, and the messy bit in the middle that we're familiar with is understood, but seen as not too important in the greater scheme of things. But it's what the compare, I suppose, is the crucial issue. And it's having that sense of nuance and understanding that you're not comparing things that are apples and oranges, that are incomparable, but trying to have a focus on things that are interesting. And that will vary in the cases. If you're interested in power sharing, then it's maybe Ireland and Bosnia and Kosovo. If you're interested in police reform or decommissioning or the role of women in the peace process, it will be a different set of cases and different issues to be case. I think two things for me are interesting in terms of the Korean peninsula. One is the question of timing. Because in some ways, all of the preparation or discussion or analysis or unification is ultimately a question of timing. And sometimes there are conflicts where if you take the Kashmir case, where I've done a lot of work in recent years, there's not too much dispute among analysts as to what at least the first stage of a post-agreement Kashmir solution would look like. I wouldn't be unfamiliar to an Irish audience. There'll be power sharing inside India controlled Kashmir between the Hindus by and large, Indian focused of Jammu, certainly the more independence minded of the Kashmir Valley. The Buddhist community feeling alienated as a minority. So there'll be power sharing. There'll no doubt be an open border between the two parts of Kashmir and there'll be improved relationships east and west. At the totally superficial level, nobody really disputes Kashmiri nationalist hope for independence, but they don't really see it happening too soon. So it's not that anyone is wondering what the solution might look like, but nobody has really any concept of how to go from here to there. In the Palestinian one with some variation, and not the similar issues, a question of movement. And for me, that's one of the interesting things around the Korean Peninsula. There's been a huge, huge issue, a prominent literature on Germany. It's a clear example for the Persecurean state. It's an obvious example in many respects. The attempt to sort of focus on 1991 lends to that example. For me, one of the problems with the German case, for all its applicability, and you certainly would want to look at it, is it does introduce an element of fatalism into the analysis. Because at least its potential is to say to the Republic of Korea, well, sit tight, wait, the North will eventually collapse. And then with your increased affluence, you'll be asked to pick up the pieces with a small amount, but fairly minimal. I promise you, of support from the international community. And it's always that is, so how much prediction in West Germany in 1988 was predicting what would happen by 1990? But the difficulty for us, especially the state, for strategic reasons, which in the positions of the Middle Power, nobody wants to perceive itself as having nothing to offer, as having nothing to do in the meantime. And it probably isn't a wide solution anyway, to simply say, well, we'll just sit tight, wait, the North will eventually collapse under its own weight. And then we'll move towards reunification. And for me, it's that while not minimizing that as a narrative, which insofar as you can predict at all, may play a role in the future, what does the Irish case, in a totally different context, of a different sort of border, of different sorts of states, what does the issue around the sort of timing and content of the Northern Ireland peace process offer that might be of interest to Korean analysts? And for me, there's a couple of questions I think that would be interesting for a Korean audience. First of all, why 1994? Why so far as in 1994? Why not in 1984? Why not in 1974? In the greater scheme of things, you might say there wasn't too much difference over those decades. But something happened between probably no earlier than 89 or 1990 and 1994 in terms of the significant changes that took place to make a ceasefire of what happened thereafter. So not predict very far in advance in most cases, but something begins to change. Can we learn by looking at multiple cases to better analyze those cases where we won't predict the future, but perhaps we begin to see the signs a little bit earlier than we currently seem to see them? Because our focus on the status quo means we tend to ignore the first 10 signs we see because they contradict our perceived wisdom. And so can we get better at perceiving the signs that we really should have noticed in hindsight? And the other one that interests me is to what extent did the informal and quasi-institutionalized cross-border cooperation and then the later institutionalizing of that in the good Friday agreement help bring about the peace process, help stabilize the peace process, help us get through times of crisis or difficulty as we have at the moment. And to take a real honest and hard look at that because if you ask the people involved in it, then of course they were the most important actors and everything was down to them. It's like the history of memoirs. So no one's gonna write a memoir saying that actually they didn't really have too much to do with the whole thing. So how do you unpick that without being mean to people to say, well, okay, you did stuff and nobody's saying it was bad, and your heart was in the right place, but we need to honestly know if actually made any impact or not or it was just something that was going on in parallel. Because it had no impact, you might discourage it but you won't put all your hopes on it. But actually if it did have an impact, then the question is, well, what impact did it have? And to what extent was that just fortuitous or could you find some kernels in there that were suitable local knowledge might offer some solutions to a totally different context than a totally different time period. And I think from the Irish case, if we did a quick round of the audience, I suspect there's no agreement in this room among people who know the Irish case very well as to what extent the role of civil society was impactful upon the broader political decisions. To what extent did the political elites feel pressurized by civil society's point of view, feel constrained by them, or did a political deal create conditions in which civil society could operate more freely but without the political deal it simply wouldn't have happened. And even when you get into the institutionalization phase, the difficulties we've had are certainly more informal cross-border linkages than ever before, more people crossing the border for work, business, pleasure, and sports. But we still struggle to institutionalize the civil society piece of that, the promissive forum in the Good Friday Agreement has itself become a hot political potato for the political class because they're not too sure about this thing in civil society. They either want to control it in which case it becomes almost meaningless, or if they give it a little bit of autonomy then it might bite them when they don't want to be bitten. And so for me, one of the sort of ways to potentially look at that is to look at the way that played out during the period of the negotiations and that maybe is something that might be of interest to our Korean guests because there were choices to be made during negotiations. We didn't just have an ID in 1989 and implement it in 1998. You know, the exact format of those negotiations. Ireland at one point, as I understand it, certainly those people in the room who were in the room and might correct me, took a decision to prioritize an institutionalized North South Ministerial Council that all sorts of things were possible. And if you look back at the media of 1992, 1993, 1994, 1994, 1994, 1994, you could probably find 40 areas of cooperation in which it would be a good idea to have some sort of body coordinating whether it's animal health and foot and mouth disease or tourism promotion or industrial promotion, health services, where people's nearest hospital was the far side of the border or their nearest school was the far side. So the list, in some ways, was endless. But obviously this was a controversial issue with between nationalists and unionists as to what to do about this. And it seems to me the UUP's preference, they knew that they would have to give something on cross-border cooperation. And certainly David Trimble's personal preference was for as much cooperation as you like, you can have as many nouns as you like, if they can go on page after page after page, as long as there's no institutions. Because any two countries who happen to share a piece of art and have a border between them, of course you want the railways, which that wasn't done in Korea to join up and not pass each other, you want the rail gauge to be the same side, you want people to build across the border, you want to, if tourism is on one side of the border, someone's willing to go across for a day trip, of course you'd promote that. But you just let it happen, you don't institutionalize it. And it seemed to me the Irish government came to the view that actually we'd rather settle for just three or four of those things if 40 is off the table, we'd take 40 if they're available, but if that's too much, we'd rather have one institution, an Orkney Ministerial Council, even if the price of that is to drop 30 or 40 of these areas of cooperation being named publicly in the agreement in a very formal way. As it happens, I think personally it was the right choice. An Orkney Orkney South Ministerial Council might start off looking at animal health and tourism in areas that are relatively uncontroversial, but institutionally it can choose by consensus to pick up any item that's irrelevant to two sides and by consensus move on it. If you set up an institution to look at animal health and a separate institution to look at health services and a separate institution to look at school children across the border, none of those institutions can ever decide to do something on policing or intelligence cooperation or the railways. They're institutionally locked in and so I think the openness of the North South Ministerial Council. For me then, this throws us back, in terms of the role of the academic analysis in this area, is you can't be an expert in everything. Unlike practitioners, you often very rarely be in the room when things are happening. So what sideways lands can you bring to these questions that brings some added value to it? And for me, when you strip away the detail of all these individual cases, there still is in some ways a fundamental division between analysts of the nature of social psychology and human behavior. And there is a one level that the declaration towards unification, that nothing will happen until you have that political deal. And then once you have the political deal, nothing is certain, but everything becomes possible. So whether it's a declaration or a unification is a good Friday agreement, a declaration or simply a road step on the map. But I think again, we'd probably all differ on it. But nonetheless, it's high level. It's the six-party talks. It's the two Koreas. It's something that shapes the whole process. It's the Oslo process on the White House law. And it just starts with that massive public declaration that we're going to sort this. And then you try and get to the details as you go along. But there is another tried and tested theoretical view. It's probably out of fashion at the moment in European circles around what academics would call neo-functionalism. What sort of the founders of the European Union, one of my early teachings in the national relations, probably crudely put them on as human approaches, you grab them by their checkbooks and their hearts and minds will follow. And so is that notion that you actually do start small? The less declarations, the better, because people are nervous with declarations. They don't know what they mean and is uncertain what they mean. But if you say it makes total economic sense to control the price of coal and steel on the European continent, well, if we can only do six countries, at least there are six important countries, and we'll start there. And we hope to get in eight countries or another product in five years' time. And is that a theoretical approach that explains the process of European integration? Again, people don't agree on it. It's not a consensus analysis by any. There are those who argue it was the post-war moment. It was the Franco-German alliance and all the other stuff just came in the aftermath of that fundamental political decision to try and create European unity. But there are equally those. And you can see it in the Irish case. Ironically, particularly in terms, I think Ulster Unionists of both major parties, spokespersons of my experience interviewing them, are much firmer believers in neo-functionalism than any of the most avowed supporters of the European integration project. And that to actually do genuinely fear Norse cooperation in any minimalist area of activity will inevitably shift the focus of people's attention. I mean, Halmer Kusker, the then deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, made his speech at the time of the 1985 Anglo-British Agreement, which, though I don't believe it any, training on political science, was a classic textbook, European integration one-on-one analysis of the Anglo-British Agreement. Because he said a one level does nothing in this particular document to send me home frightened at night. But slowly, but surely it's designed to shift the gaze of the average Ulster Unionist from London to Dublin as the place where they're more likely to get a hearing, more likely to pursue some local issue that the need resolved, whether it's on roads, health, education. And from him, that was a problematic point of view. And therefore, you needed to stop at that. Because his analysis of human and political behavior was that if people start interacting on those day-to-day issues, ultimately you need some sort of political layer to finalize that decision. And therefore, if you want the prize of doing a deal on animal health, you need an authority to say, well, here's the details, and here's the document, and we'll all sign it and move on from here. And that will create its own dynamic towards change. I think the jury is out in the Irish case, so Korean guests were hoping for an answer from me as to which road to go. I think it isn't clear in terms of the interactions between civil and political society to use those terms during the peace process period. I think it's certainly safe to say that those books that push very heavy weight on the human people-to-people interactions oversell the case. And I think it's probably safe to say that without a political deal, people-to-people track to civil society interactions are somewhere between impossible and extremely difficult. So it's not that civil society-good, political class-bad is a remotely inaccurate analysis of the Irish case. But I think some political deals became more possible when there was more interaction between people. Certain political deals became more possible because it was a logic to a cross-border cooperation in a particular field that just made social and economic or fiscal sense in terms of governments, even in good times, never have enough money for all the demands under plates. And in bad times, they don't have money for pretty much of it. So I think there's a symbiotic relationship between the civil and political society. I'd probably personally lean towards the political side dominating. I think civil society reflects political society rather the other way around. But there's plenty of people who take the opposite point of view. But I still think from the point of view the Irish case is interesting in that sort of level of detail. And I think it will be interesting for Korean scholars to look at some of those interactions. It's even more tricky because the border is not only militarized, as the Irish border was, but it's sealed, which the Irish border wasn't. Lots of sealed roads, but the border was never sealed. And therefore, but nonetheless, it was often sealed in people's minds. I think the ESRI, I think it was at a survey in about 1979. And they basically drew a border between Galway and Dublin, which cuts the island of Ireland in half or more or less. I said, well, if you're above that line, the chances are you'd drive across the border by accident at some stage almost. You're just going to Donegal and, you know. But if you're below the border, actually you've probably got to decide to cross the border. And it was just a survey of, have you ever been across the border? And it was a shocking low proportion of Irish people, despite probably a stronger sense of Irish nationalism at that time. The people just, the border was open. You could get in your car and drive, you could get in the bus or train and go, but people didn't tend to. So even though the border was open, I think that necessarily probably exaggerates the level of actual interaction there was. And so for me, is that sort of, are there possibilities in the context of political talks where there is no possibility in 12 months or a two-year period of getting to a political declaration, where that's simply not the moment we're at? But perhaps in the context of economic cooperation, of the economic zones, of labor market issues, there's the possibility to say, well, if we're doing that deal, could we maybe tag on something around people-to-people interactions, academic-to-academic interactions, civil society, which can be easier to accept. They're always threatening. Political, I mean, the experience in Ireland is, it's a mistake to feel the political leaders see them as untreatening. You've got to assume they see them as threatening, but persuade them that those threats are low level and work taking, because this will be a useful thing to put around whatever other deal is being done. And I think for the Republic of Korea, those opportunities, if available, ought to be grasped, because I think they do have an impact that's hard to measure, hard to pin down, but is rarely negative and mostly positive, if you can put it no stronger than that. I don't think they brought us to good for the agreement, but I think they were an interesting part of the dynamic to help to create it and sustain it. And for me, those are the sort of interesting aspects of the Irish case that might be pertinent to the contemporary period on the Korean Peninsula. But for all the differences, I think it's that relationship of how do you get political movement, and what's the relationship between the political class and the civil society class that does cross-frontiers. There are some fundamental truths or human and political behavior in there, and that I think the differences are not so great that those are not pertinent to the Korean case, that are certainly interesting in the Irish case. Thank you.