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Hong Kong national security law
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Rana Mitter
Rana Mitter

On Reflection | In Hong Kong’s national security law era, echoes of Northern Ireland’s Troubles

  • Draconian security laws, identity politics, linguistic divides, violent and non-violent resistance. Sound familiar?
  • The strange case of Northern Ireland shows the dangers, and opportunities, that come when a land is subject to different interpretations of its identity

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A burning car in the Catholic area of Shortstrand during the Troubles in Belfast in 1996. Photo: AFP
Rana Mitter
Over the months of Hong Kong’s current crisis, one particular statement from the government in Beijing intrigued me: the repeated assertion that the Joint Declaration signed between Britain and China in 1984 was a thing of the past. China had sovereignty over the former colony, in this reading of events. That’s all there was to it.
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I wondered whether there were any precedents for a country abiding by a treaty relating to its own territory but monitored by outside bodies. I didn’t have to look too far from my home in Britain to find one: the territory of Northern Ireland. And the strange case of sovereignty in Northern Ireland shows the dangers, as well as the opportunities, that come when a patch of land is subject to two very different interpretations of its identity. The case is not exactly parallel with Hong Kong’s. Almost nobody, including most democrats in Hong Kong, denies that the special administrative region (SAR) is an integral part of China and is going to stay that way. But what Hong Kong’s identity means within China is still a highly fluid question, thrown into yet more relief by the passing of the national security law over the past few weeks. That’s where looking at Northern Ireland’s curious history throws up intriguing comparisons.

Anti-government protesters vandalise an HSBC branch in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Photo: Dickson Lee
Anti-government protesters vandalise an HSBC branch in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Photo: Dickson Lee
Northern Ireland today is a sovereign part of the United Kingdom. However, nearly half of its population sees itself as belonging to another country, Ireland. To accommodate this seemingly impossible conundrum over where the population feels loyalties, an arrangement has been made by which citizens of Northern Ireland can claim British or Irish citizenship, or both. The whole arrangement is underpinned by the Good Friday Agreement, a treaty which (like the Joint Declaration) is lodged at the United Nations.
But you don’t need to know much history to know that the current uneasy settlement was not reached quickly or smoothly. Britain’s sense of its own sovereignty often rivals China’s in terms of prickliness and sensitivity; it was one of the reasons for Brexit. For most of “the Troubles”, British governments maintained that Northern Ireland was a piece of the UK exactly like any other, and that the only identity that was open to its residents was a top-down definition essentially defined in London (even though most of the politicians there shared the view of one Conservative cabinet minister that it was a “bloody awful place”).

Northern Ireland became a cauldron of protest, at first non-violent, but bursting into an appalling civil war that killed 3,000 people over 30 years. The London government imposed draconian security laws, including suspension of trial by jury, and internment without trial. You didn’t have to be violent to be arrested; rumours of connections to outlawed groups gained through faulty intelligence were enough. And the most noticeable opposition to British rule turned from being a non-violent civil resistance (which persisted through impressive figures such as the nationalist leader John Hume) to something much more violent and sinister.

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