Should central government leaders be able to exercise autocratic powers in some circumstances to curtail the operation of local democratic institutions? Although this question applies to Beijing’s relationship with Hong Kong, there are other cases in the world where this issue has been examined that provide interesting comparisons. In 1972 and again in 2000, Britain unilaterally suspended Northern Ireland’s parliament. Before taking these steps – much like Hong Kong’s relationship with China – Northern Ireland was an autonomous region that was guaranteed a wide range of autonomous powers. Northern Ireland’s autonomous parliament had been in existence for around five decades when Britain suspended it in April 1972. In response to this action, which mirrors the dire warnings some pundits express about damage to Hong Kong’s autonomy , critics argued that Northern Ireland’s autonomy was a sham. There was little, they said, to differentiate Northern Ireland from sham autonomous arrangements, such as the infamous “homelands” of South Africa or France’s empty promises to the “free states” of Indochina . They said the unilateral suspension of the local parliament proved that Northern Ireland never had real autonomy in the first place. Instead, they concluded, it merely had delegated power that could be taken away by the whim of the central government. The reality, however, was that the UK was constrained by unwritten constitutional rules. These rules allowed the core state to suspend institutions to preserve public order. Rather than being an exercise in arbitrary central government interests, the suspension was in response to widespread civil unrest that had overtaken the territory between unionists who wanted to stay with the UK and nationalists who wanted to secede. Northern Ireland had become plagued by large-scale sectarian confrontations. There were increased Irish Republican Army (IRA) recruitment and terrorist attacks, escalating clashes with the police and military, and the eventual killing of 13 Catholic demonstrators in Derry in January 1972, known as “Bloody Sunday” . After years of instability and laborious negotiation designed to balance the interests of unionists and nationalists, Britain helped reestablish Northern Ireland’s autonomous institutions under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement . But doubts about Northern Ireland’s autonomous status within the UK re-emerged when the British again suspended the local parliament in February 2000 and several more times in the following years. This time, the issue was that the remnants of the IRA had not handed over their weapons as agreed. Ultimately, however, Northern Ireland’s Assembly was restored in May 2007 after the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement. The point of these examples is that, unlike the arbitrary interventionism of core states that control sham autonomous territories, Britain’s interventions were in accordance with principles that ultimately supported long-term local autonomy. First, the decisions were consistent with Britain’s own unwritten constitutional rules which allowed temporarily suspending institutions to restore public order. Beyond this, however, an extra layer of trust was provided by the fact Britain’s own central government abides by constitutional rules with regard to the regulation of power. Second, the central government’s ultimate intention in these cases was not to wreck Northern Ireland’s autonomy but to restore it. Britain has paid a heavy price for alienating people during historic cases of repression, which has resulted in the fragmentation of a once vast empire. Consequently, in modern times, it has instead embraced autonomy as a solution. This has ultimately paid valuable dividends of peace, stability, reconciliation and economic growth in Northern Ireland. In the case of Hong Kong-China relations, the problem is not necessarily the exercise of national security laws or, as the British cases illustrate, even the possible suspension of democratic institutions under some circumstances. Instead, the problem is that in China’s authoritarian system, the will of the Communist Party leadership is the ultimate source of power rather than the lofty promises in its 1982 constitution . On the mainland, the central government does not strive to promote the rule of law and liberal freedoms such as a free press or freedom of assembly. In fact, the opposite is true. As a consequence, many assume that just as China does not fully implement constitutional rules on the mainland, the same phenomenon will apply to its policies towards Hong Kong. In spite of such perceptions, however, Hong Kong remarkably maintained widely acknowledged autonomy, rule of law and judicial independence for more than two decades under Chinese sovereignty before the national security law. If China is serious about sustaining Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and calming critics at home and abroad as it implements national security rules, it would do well to provide greater assurances. In accordance with the British experience, Chinese and Hong Kong authorities are out of touch with reality if they believe force and fear alone can provide stability – much less patriotism – without negotiation, compromise and reconciliation. An important starting point for such outcomes would be to expedite the judiciary’s injunction for creating a truly independent commission to examine police abuses in 2019 in accordance with the recent Hong Kong Journalists Association case; do more to demonstrate executive branch accountability for the fear and anger caused by the failed extradition bill, rather than pretending the 2019 demonstrations were caused by foreign actors, and; support the resumption of democratic reforms stalled in 2015. David A. Rezvani teaches Asian politics, international relations and writing at Dartmouth College and is the author of Surpassing the Sovereign State: The Wealth, Self-Rule, and Security Advantages of Partially Independent Territories