Belfast: Divided City in Historical Context
From its inception as a small garrison town, Belfast has been a contested place where British state building in Ireland faced various obstacles and forms of resistance. Wider conflicts set the context and fuelled local divisions in Belfast, from Britain's wars with Catholic Spain and France, through England's Civil War, Williamite wars in the late seventeenth century, the American and French revolutionary conflicts, and the ensuing struggle between Irish nationalism and the nationalism of imperial Britain. Whereas external actors have historically served to exacerbate or preserve division and conflict in Belfast, significantly it was an international coalition - the US government, the EU, civil society organisations, and, most importantly, a strong partnership between the British and Irish governments - which was instrumental in forging the current political settlement. This marks a major break in the context of deep-rooted ethno-religious and ethno-national divisions which have generated recurring conflict in Belfast and its hinterland over at least three centuries.
From the early 1600s to 1750, Belfast was a relatively small settler's town, juxtaposing English (Anglican) and Scotch (dissenting Presbyterian) settlers with a small and marginalised (Catholic) Irish population. Although the city's population had reached only 20,000 by 1800, in the previous fifty years it had developed substantially as a commercial centre, a port of exit for large-scale Scotch-Irish emigration to America, and a centre of the cotton industry. It had also become a centre of Presbyterian radicalism, influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment and American and French revolutionary ideas, and opposed to the landed Anglican gentry - the 'Protestant Ascendancy' - who owned most of Ireland and exclusively controlled the Dublin parliament, long subordinate to its British counterpart.
The United Irishmen, founded by Presbyterians in Belfast in 1791, sought to unite 'Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters' in establishing a republican Irish state in alliance with revolutionary France. The United Irish rebellion in 1798 was bloodily suppressed and the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland followed in 1801.
Under the Union, Belfast was dramatically transformed into the largest city in Ireland. Between the late 1830s and 1901 its population increased over ten-fold from 30,000 to 350,000, in a period when the Irish population as a whole declined dramatically following the Great Famine. Bigger than Dublin by the early 1900s, it was the only major centre of industrialisation in Ireland, specialising in linen manufacture, shipbuilding and engineering. Strongly integrated into British imperial networks, industrial Belfast embedded and deepened ethno-religious and ethno-national divisions in its social and physical fabric. As Catholic and Protestant migrants flooded into the city from the countryside, popular sectarian struggles re-formed within the new urban, industrial environment. By the 1880s these popular divisions crystallised in a political struggle over Irish Home Rule. Belfast became the centre of an Ulster Unionist movement implacably opposed to even limited Home Rule for Catholic-majority Ireland; and then the capital of a new jurisdiction, Northern Ireland, carved out by the British partition of Ireland in 1920. Belfast was now the iconic city of Protestant, unionist and British Ireland, but nearly a third of its population were Catholic and Irish nationalist.
The basic structure of industrial Belfast and its sectarian geography persisted from the 1920s to the 1960s, as a quasi-ethnocratic local administration sought to protect a Protestant-unionist majority and by extension Northern Ireland's place within the UK. From the early 1960s, however, a series of interrelated developments laid the basis for unprecedented upheaval: the rapid contraction of traditional industries, the attraction of new industries, the decentralisation of population and employment from Belfast to new growth centres in the wider metropolitan area, and the mobilisation of nationalists against what they perceived to be the modernisation of sectarian discrimination and unionist monopoly power. As the 'Troubles' escalated from the late 1960s, Catholics became more concentrated in overcrowded enclaves within the city, while Protestants remained in the new suburbs and growth centres, leaving behind residual 'loyalist' working class communities especially in west and north Belfast committed to defending their territory.
The 'Troubles', the paramilitary campaigns and the military containment policies of the British government, sharpened and extended the sectarian boundaries in Belfast. The 'City of the Troubles' was characterised by economic crisis, mass unemployment, especially in Catholic areas, a sustained bombing campaign and a central shopping area surrounded by a formidable metal barrier, though much of the lethal violence was concentrated in working class areas to its west and north. The city became disarticulated into a series of poorly connected districts and communities; and the city council area became more disconnected from the wider metropolitan region as its ethnic balance shifted to near parity between the two dominant ethno-national communities while surrounding metropolitan areas remained heavily unionist. Contrarily, with the decline of old segregated industrial workplaces and the gradual implementation of equality legislation, workplaces, unlike residential areas, in general became more mixed. Like the rest of Northern Ireland, Belfast's economy became heavily dependent on high levels of public expenditure and subvention from Westminster, with heavy subsidisation of the private sector and investment in new health and leisure facilities. While working class housing was substantially improved, this had the overall effect of widening the gulf with middle class areas relatively unaffected by violence.
Following the paramilitary ceasefires of the mid-1990s, popular ethno-national struggles to symbolically claim or re-claim territories paradoxically intensified, in the form of parades, marches, flag-flying, murals, and so-called 'peacewalls'. Throughout the torturous peace process, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and its uncertain aftermath, concerted efforts were made to address the legacy of the conflict, to re-brand the city as a place for new investment, improved housing, infrastructure and tourism. Under Direct Rule from Westminster (1972-1998), the governance of Belfast had been characterised by a highly complex and unwieldy bureaucracy and a vibrant voluntary sector, but with the full implementation of the Agreement in 2007 hitherto marginalised elected representatives are now attempting to influence urban regeneration. While the economic base of the city remains heavily dependent on a consumer economy and public expenditure, the increased population of Greater Belfast (700,000 - of which 276,000 are in the city council area), together with the dramatic rise of Greater Dublin (now 1.7 million) and the promotion of a Belfast-Dublin growth corridor, has encouraged a re-imagining of Belfast within a wider island economy.
Visually, 'Consumerist Belfast', as represented by the Laganside, Titanic Quarter and large scale retail and leisure developments in the city centre, contrasts starkly with the persistence of 'Troubles Belfast' characterised by the 'peacewalls' and 'interfaces' between social deprived working class communities, still deeply segregated along ethno-national lines. The major, overarching question is whether, 'post-conflict' Belfast can make the transition from a 'divided' to a 'shared' city. Can it generate the dynamics to challenge the persistent patterns of ethno-national segregation and recurring violence that have characterised so much of its history?
Select sources: J. Bardon (1982) An Illustrated History of Belfast, Belfast: Blackstaff; F.Boal and S. Royle (eds) Enduring City: Belfast in the Twentieth Century, Belfast: Blackstaff; and E. Jones (1960) A Social Geography of Belfast, London: Oxford University Press.