Former US President Barack Obama has warned that democracy is “not inevitable” as he received an honorary degree from Queen’s University Belfast.
The 44th US president praised Northern Ireland’s peace process during his visit on Tuesday, describing the Good Friday Agreement as a shining example of what can be achieved when people choose peace over conflict.
Challenge to students
He told students at Queen’s: “The Good Friday Agreement is still a shining example of what can happen when people put aside old wounds and choose peace. But as we have seen in many countries, including in my home country the United States, peace and democracy are not inevitable.
“They have to be chosen, again and again.”
Encouraging the university community to keep setting the standard, he added: “I want to use this opportunity as an honorary Queen’s graduate to leave you all with a challenge and that is to keep showing the way.”
Conversation at the arena
Following his campus visit, Mr Obama addressed a packed crowd at the arena on Tuesday evening in a wide-ranging conversation hosted by journalist Susan McKay. Speaking on striving for peace amid global instability, he rallied the audience to “insist that we can do better than we’re doing right now.”
Asked what hope means to him in difficult times, Mr Obama said society must “rediscover what’s the story we tell about how we’re going to live together, and see each other, and recognise each other, and disagree, and yet, still care for each other.
“The Good Friday Agreement came about not just because of exhaustion and people being weary of violence,” he said. “It was also – somebody started imagining something better, and they saw themselves and each other in a different kind of way.”
He told the crowd: “People ask me sometimes how I can still be hopeful. It’s an assertion. It’s a practice. It is me saying: this is how I prefer to live.
“I am going to assume the best in people. I am going to be willing to recognise my own flaws and consider how I can be better.
“I’m going to insist that we can do better than we’re doing right now. And there’s something in us that recognises ourselves and others, that has an impulse towards kindness, but also an impulse towards cruelty, and I know which side of that contest I want to be on.
“And I will fight for that, even if I don’t always think it’s going to win.”
Gaza and Middle East peace
During the event, Ms McKay read concluding lines from Michael Longley’s poem Ceasefire and asked what could be done to bring peace to the Middle East.
Mr Obama admitted he was “not as hopeful as I want to be in the short term” given the “aftermath of what’s happened in Gaza and the nature of political changes that have taken place in Israel.”
He said: “Right now I think that the anger, the strengthening of right-wing forces inside of Israel, the settler movement; the constant changing of the facts on the West Bank, the continued suffering that’s taking place in Gaza, and I think the hardening of attitudes inside of Israel after October 7 means that we have to probably work for a genuine cessation of violence and relief for the people of Gaza as a step, then to even talk about the kinds of long-lasting peace that you described earlier, and it pains me, and it should pain everyone.
“To witness what happened there, it’s a distillation of us being trapped in history and a tribal, elemental, unforgiving divide that obviously there were times where we saw here in Northern Ireland, we have seen on every continent, and we see we have seen in every race, religion, ethnic group, and it’s a sort of madness once it breaks out.
“And the sense of grievance on either side feeds on itself to the point where, ‘I cannot even see that other person’, and it will justify anything.”
