The Future of the ‘Radical Centre’ in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement Jocelyn A. J. Evans and Jonathan Tonge University of Salford The 1998 Good Friday Agreement has provided a new political dispensation in Northern Ireland. Through the management of the competing aims of unionism and nationalism, the Agreement hopes to promote cross-community consensus and forge a new, moderate centre. However, the segmental autonomy evident under the consociationalism of the Agreement poses questions of the existing political centre in Northern Ireland. Traditionally, the centre, as represented by the Alliance Party, has rejected unionism and nationalism, believing either to be ideologies to be over- come, rather than accommodated. Under the post-Agreement political arrangements, Alliance has already been obliged to bolster pro-Agreement unionism, through the temporary tactical redesig- nation of three of its Assembly members as Unionist and through tacit support for selected union- ist election candidates. Using the first ever membership survey of the existing centre party in Northern Ireland, this article examines whether its vision of a radical third tradition is sustainable in a polity in which unionist and nationalist politics are legitimised. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) offered the prospect of a new political dispensation in Northern Ireland. As long-standing advocates of devolved power sharing, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) endorsed the Agreement. Yet the Agreement posed theoretical and practical problems for Northern Ireland’s main bi-confessional centre party. The consociational underpinnings of the GFA appeared to institutionalise a unionist-nationalist dichotomy within Northern Ireland politics, at odds with the APNI’s view that the construction of ‘one com- munity’ was required (Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, 2000). Since the party’s establishment in 1970, it has clung to a belief that a third tradition, post- nationalist or -unionist, could be established. In practical terms, the GFA threat- ened to further reduce the narrow centre ground farmed by Alliance. The reductionism of the GFA, in obliging Northern Ireland Assembly members to self- designate as ‘Unionist’, ‘Nationalist’, or ‘Other’, allied to weighted majority provi- sions with no role for the ‘Other’ bloc, has arguably further entrenched ethnic bloc politics. Extending this argument, the supposed legitimation of Unionist versus Nationalist politics has moved voters further from what, in any case, has been described as the ‘mythical’ centre ground (Arthur and Jeffrey, 1996, p. 51). Alliance Party support has fallen to a very low level, matched only by the period during Northern Ireland’s earlier experiment in consociationalism, the Sunningdale power-sharing executive of 1974. The commencement of decommissioning of weapons by the Provisional IRA in October 2001 briefly improved prospects for Northern Ireland’s political institu- tions. Yet the considerable size of the anti-Agreement wing of unionism has POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 26–50 © Political Studies Association, 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA