Demands for Northern Ireland to have ‘special
EU status’ – eg, in the European Economic Area like Norway and Iceland, or, the deluxe model, staying in the Single Market – are shorthand for some necessarily wider UK-EU arrangement. To avoid a hard land border, it has to encompass the customs arrangements not only with ‘the rest of the UK’, (ie, Britain, with or without Scotland), but also with ‘the rest of the (continental) EU’, and with ‘the rest of the world’. It has to involve all the island’s borders, and being an island helps. A hybrid solution with shared management This could safeguard all-island free trade, the
South’s crucial access to markets in Britain, and the North’s to continental markets. Ireland could go from potentially suffering most from Brexit to being comparatively advantaged. It could simultaneously be in a free-trade zone with Britain, and in one with the continental EU. These larger zones would overlap in Ireland but would otherwise be completely separated from each other by the hard borders which Britain and the continental EU want for themselves. In effect the island would be an ‘intermediate’ space located within the hard borders separating Britain from the EU. Princeton Professor Philip Pettit has detailed
a ‘shared-space’ model of how the entry and exit customs regulations might work. These are always complicated, especially for people and goods which originate ‘elsewhere’, but to summarise his main points: regulations stay the same as at present for the entry of people and goods to the island from the continental EU and from Britain; exit to the continent and Britain would also follow the existing rules of free-movement for people and goods originating in Ireland; but not for those originating outside Ireland. For example, non-Irish EU citizens travelling from Ireland can be denied entry to Britain; and non-Irish goods – for example, cheap US hormone-saturated beef imported into the UK, which contravenes EU health standards – can be denied entry to the continent. This model’s great strength is that much remains the same, but this is also a weakness. Pettit sees the customs authorities in the North and the South mostly operating as presently for things entering and exiting their part of the island, but there is no acknowledgement that their ‘shared- space’ needs shared or joint management (even if it
Above: Customs facilities along the border would be an open invitation for the ‘dissident republicans’ to copy the IRA’s 1950’s Border
Campaign attacking border posts and personnel; Below: In 2016 hundreds of people from both sides of the Irish border gathered at the Londonderry- Donegal frontier to protest against Brexit
annoys unionism’s right-wing nationalistic fringe). And Ireland already has the basic institutional infrastructures (eg, a North-South Ministerial Council and a British-Irish Council) for shared management democratically accountable to both political jurisdictions, North and South. This is absolutely essential, especially as trade patterns will change in new and threatening ways and Ireland’s border management must be able to respond. Take the dreaded US hormoned-beef: Britain might import it, but both electorates might want to stop it entering Ireland. Smart politics? The reasons for avoiding a hard land border are
compelling and solutions are available, but popular pressure is needed. The EU may not owe Britain any favours but it certainly owes the vulnerable Irish Republic, ‘EU loyal’ to a fault. Northern Ireland, likewise vulnerable, will have a major concentration of EU/Irish citizens living outside the EU who can demand to be heard. If the EU is politically smart – always a question – it will reward its supporters (including Scotland where 62% opposed Brexit, though its situation is very different from Ireland’s). And if Irish nationalists are smart – sometimes another big ‘if’ – they will not confuse the challenge of stopping a hard land border with the perennial demand for a ‘border poll’ on politically re-uniting Ireland. A reckless Brexit might ultimately lead to that, maybe even to a federal Ireland in a confederation with Scotland and both in the EU. But this is to run far ahead of reality. Arguably a border poll will not produce majorities for a united
Ireland, especially in the present uncertainties of Brexit. It’s a divisive distraction from the immediate task of stopping a hard border. That needs the active support of at least a minority of unionists along with nationalists and others. n
Please note that this article was written in April, before the UK General Election
i
James Anderson is Emeritus Professor of Political Geography in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and a founder-member of the Centre for International Borders Research at Queen’s University Belfast. Email
j.anderson@
qub.ac.uk Telephone 028 9097 3361
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