The flexibility of Northern Ireland Unionists and Afrikaner Nationalists in comparative perspective

A common feature of comparisons of Northern Ireland and South Africa prior to
South Africa's transition and the Northern Ireland peace process was the siege
mentality of the dominant communities in the two societies. The paper examines
two attempts to analyse this in greater depth that were published before the major
changes of the 1990s: Michael McDonald's Children of Wrath and Donald Akenson's
God's Peoples. It reviews their arguments in the light of the current situation in
both Northern Ireland and South Africa. Consideration is then given to how the discourse
on the character of both communities changed in the course of the 1990s
and to the comparisons that changing circumstances gave rise to, while a striking
instance of the recent use of the older comparison of the Unionists and Afrikaner
nationalists is noted and discussed. The paper concludes by asking whether the notion
of a siege mentality still has any current applicability in these two cases