In our mercurial and periodic relationship with freedom of mobility, we are descending from yet another peak. From migrating nomads to fortressed tribes, continental empires to Westphalian sovereign states, and more recently, a globalised workforce and worldwide free trade; we are now at a tipping point. The ‘Wall’ is back as the de rigueur spatial device for asserting territorial sovereignty, and trade wars are reviving old mercantilist obsessions. There is however one exception, where there is a drawn-out struggle to avoid having any such built manifestation of a border at all. In fact, the fate of an entire nation, possibly even a group of nations, rests almost entirely on something that does not physically exist, and should not ever exist. It is the border on the island of Ireland.
On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted in a referendum, expressing their will for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to leave the European Union. Should this happen, the only external land border of the EU with the UK would be between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is some cosmic coincidence of history that this border happens to be precisely in a territory where there have been decades of violent sectarian conflict: the Troubles. Given the UK’s historic and present entanglement in prominent sectarian conflicts abroad, it appears that the one on its very own doorstep has been conveniently forgotten in the last two decades of a tentative, fragile ‘peace’. Brexit, however, has reopened these old wounds which have barely been healed.
The Troubles’ euphemistic name does little to hide the fact that the conflict was just short of a civil war within the UK’s territory; with violence extending from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain, and beyond. At its core, the conflict was a war over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, running (not always neatly) along political, ethno-nationalist, and religious lines — a recurring aftermath of imperial policies of partition. With acts of terror provoked on both sides and the state retaliating with its own brutality, the price of this war was a death toll of over a thousand, and tens of thousands others wounded. For predominantly Protestant unionist/loyalist communities, their struggle was to defend Northern Ireland’s status as an inalienable part of the United Kingdom. For the predominantly Catholic nationalist/republican communities who composed of the minority in Northern Ireland, their struggle was for the recognition of Northern Ireland as a part of a united Irish nation.
Right: Kerbstones painted in the colours of the tricolour of the Irish Republic (Image credit: Eric Fischer, adapted and edited by the author under a Creative Commons license)
PAINTED KERBSTONES: the battle of recognition takes literally to the streets, where even the pavements are politicised. Kerbstones and road markings are painted to signal the community and their territory’s sectarian allegiance: red, white and blue to the Kingdom, and green, white and orange to the Republic. The Irish tricolour’s symbol of the truce (white) between Catholic (green) and Protestant (orange) is lost in a poignant irony of its sectarian urbanism.
The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998 was the watershed moment that unlocked these intractable forces, and the key was compromise. Like the original 1920 compromise between unionists and nationalists that led to partition, the Belfast Agreement patched over its aftermath with another compromise: a sort of Schrödinger’s constitutional settlement, a ‘smudged sovereignty’. Northern Ireland would still be de jure a part of the United Kingdom and Ireland would modify its irredentist claim on the territory in its constitution. However, through a series of measures such as dual citizenship, cross-border governance structures and markets, and mandatory cross-community power-sharing, a finely-tuned balance was achieved: concessions for nationalists who wanted unification and safeguards for loyalists who wanted to preserve the union. This balance coaxed both sides into a compromise and a cessation of violence, and established a fragile peace. In creating this balance, the sovereignty of the Republic of Ireland and the UK were inevitably entangled. Untangling and upsetting this balance because of Brexit, would put that peace back at risk.
While movement of people across the Irish border has been enshrined by the Common Travel Area since 1923, the EU membership of both Ireland and UK with its common trade policy and Single Market regulations meant there has been little need for border checks since 1992. Crucially, this meant that the Belfast Agreement allowed for the total removal of any physical infrastructure on the border, including old checkpoints, which were historically targets for paramilitary attacks. With Brexit, for the first time since the signing of the Belfast Agreement, trade policy and goods regulations might diverge, potentially requiring physical checks of goods moving across a border that is still supposed to remain invisible. One part of the EU external border would also have to be virtually non-existent.
CHECKPOINTS ON A LINE IN THE SOIL: The Irish border, inheriting old county borders, is highly irregular, bisecting rural lanes and open countryside. After the jurisdiction over the island of Ireland was partitioned, border-crossings were only sanctioned at so-called ‘approved routes’. What were first customs posts eventually became fortified watchtowers and militarised checkpoints at the height of the conflict. All of the many other crossings, hereby ‘unapproved routes’, had their bridges demolished and roads blocked or dug out, curbing the mobility of borderland communities. Border-crossings, a daily necessity for many, became slow, unpredictable and bureaucratic. Yet fundamentally, the border’s militarisation was riddled with its own hypocrisies: the border was in reality highly porous to illicit crossings in the countryside on foot, and the physical military infrastructure served more as an architectonic symbol of the British state asserting and demarcating its sovereignty through exercising its control over mobility.
While the irreconcilability of Brexit and the Belfast Agreement was barely discussed as an issue during the referendum campaign in 2016, it has since become a lynchpin around which the politics of the UK, Ireland and the EU have revolved. With each party pursuing individual agendas and strategising in the shifting political sands, the people and the ‘peace’ in Northern Ireland have become bargaining chips and a proxy battleground for the wider geopolitical tussle between larger powers and the divided factions within them. While all parties agree that the violence of the Troubles should never be reignited and that the Belfast Agreement should be sacrosanct, they fundamentally disagree on its future implementation post-Brexit. Negotiations have been deadlocked in a tangled web of mutually-exclusive positions.
The current quagmire revolves around one particular solution, which forms an inalienable part of the Withdrawal Agreement: the notorious ‘backstop’. The Withdrawal Agreement was reached on 25 November 2018, at a summit in Brussels between the EU and the UK, and it is at present pending ratification but closed from further negotiation. The backstop was proposed by the EU as an insurance policy that would come into effect in the absence of an agreed future relationship between the EU and UK. Northern Ireland would remain in the EU’s VAT system, customs union and large parts of the Single Market, in order to prevent any divergence between the two sides of the Irish border and therefore eliminate the need for border infrastructure. In effect, the EU will exercise exclusive economic control over a part of the UK; namely Northern Ireland’s taxation, trade, and regulation. However, the fundamental issues are not so much solved, rather, they are displaced: a hard sea border would be created between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, dividing the United Kingdom and risking fresh tensions in the unionist community. In the backstop’s final version, the EU conceded to allow the rest of the UK to join a basic customs union, but regulatory and taxation borders will nevertheless be created; the result is an unprecedented voluntary carving up of a unitary state in peacetime.
HOME RULE, DIRECT RULE: The Irish struggle has been characterised by a need to establish democratic and self-governing institutions within Irish territory itself, with Irish revolutionaries establishing a Dublin-based revolutionary parliament as one of their first actions after the 1916 Easter Rising. While Northern Ireland has had a devolved government, or Home Rule, since partition, from Troubles-stricken 1972 until the Belfast Agreement these powers were rescinded and control was reverted back to Westminster under Direct Rule. The backstop may bring a new form of Direct Rule from Brussels, a yet more distant seat of power, as another change in the chequered history of self-governance in the province.
This internal border created within the UK by the backstop has become the defining issue in the Westminster parliamentary impasse. As a result of 2017’s general election, the Democratic Unionist Party, a Northern Irish hard-line loyalist party, holds the balance of power and provides the Conservative government with its majority in Parliament required to govern, albeit just barely. While the British Prime Minister has agreed to the deal, it also requires Parliament to ratify it. This could require the DUP to vote for something that is fundamentally antithetical to its identity (and vocally supported by their long-time staunch opponents, the hard-line republicans Sinn Féin). Otherwise, complicating the parliamentary arithmetic is a divided opposition Labour party, reluctant to be seen facilitating the government’s Brexit, and various intransigent groups whose primary tactic involves opposing everything in order to achieve their respective goals; either a second referendum or a no-deal exit. Unsurprisingly, this deadlock has produced three parliamentary defeats of the Withdrawal Agreement, including the largest government defeat in modern history. As of now, the Brexit deadline has already been pushed back twice, as the government tries to cobble together a way forward.
ABSTENTIONISM: Elected Members of Parliament in the Sinn Féin party do not recognise the authority of the House of Commons based in London over the people of the island of Ireland; they see the British Parliament as an imperialist, overseas institution. By long-standing tradition, they blatantly refuse to recognise the House of Commons by literally declining to take their seats in the benches of the Commons chamber. Churchill referred to Parliament when he said, “we shape our buildings and thereafter our buildings shape us.” The potent symbolism of being shaped by sitting in this chamber, when a statue of Oliver Cromwell, the brutal conqueror of Ireland, still stands at its entrance, is well understood by Sinn Féin MPs.
All of this strife is perhaps due to the backstop itself being inherently problematic. It is a legally binding agreement, and as yet there is not any legal, unilateral way for the whole UK to leave it intact. With Northern Ireland’s economy relying on manufacturing and agriculture, it hands control over important parts of Northern Ireland’s economy to the EU, where the people of Northern Ireland will not be represented by members in the European Parliament or by European commissioners, and Northern Ireland’s elected representatives in Stormont and Westminster will have little ability to influence how they are to be governed. When its value-added tax rules are also to be controlled elsewhere, it leads to an uncomfortable potential for taxation without representation.
While countries such as Norway may take EU rules without being able to make them, they reserve their sovereign right to withdraw from their economic cooperation, whereas there are few democratic, legal mechanisms for Northern Ireland to be free of the backstop, with one option being a vote for a united Ireland. Enshrined in Article 1(i) and (ii) of the Belfast Agreement is one of its central pillars, the principle of consent, whereby the constitutional status of Northern Ireland would not change unless the choice is “freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland”, and the right to self-determination “is for the people of the island of Ireland alone […] without external impediment” to exercise. While the people of Northern Ireland voted solidly to remain in the EU, the backstop proposes a materially different, even constitutional, change in the way in they are to be governed, agreed above their heads by EU leaders. These changes have never been approved by a majority of the Northern Irish people. With Northern Ireland breaking the world record for not having an elected government, due to a breakdown in relations between its power-sharing parties, the people of Northern Ireland are inadequately represented on this matter. It is on the basis of undermining the principle of consent which Lord Trimble, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning pioneer behind the Belfast Agreement, is seeking a judicial review of the backstop’s legality. The mechanism claiming to protect the Belfast Agreement ironically may threaten the agreement itself.
At its heart, the backstop is a gross oversimplification of what makes the Belfast Agreement work. Its raison d’être has been reduced by the EU and the Republic of Ireland into the issue of the Irish border exclusively. Regrettably, the UK government has been largely acquiescent to this narrative; after all, for many a time in Irish history the sensitivities of the unionist/nationalist conflict have been badly understood by governments in Westminster, with terrible consequences. This oversimplified narrative neglects the Belfast Agreement’s wider purpose: enshrining measures in international law that are meant to preserve the fragile balance and compromise between unionist and nationalist concerns. Unionists are understandably aggrieved under the current proposals, which they believe would tip the balance towards the nationalist direction — this grievance and perceived imbalance alone is reason enough to upset the peace. Indeed, it has already in cases reignited tensions, despite all parties claiming that their primary aim is to avoid conflict. The idea that a technocratic, ‘apolitical’ proposal can protect a peace process built on political inter-communal reconciliation is fatally misguided.
Uncoincidentally, this oversimplified narrative conveniently aligns with the EU’s trade and economic interests. In the absence of an agreed future relationship which would keep the UK close in terms of its future economic model, the UK would likely undercut tariff barriers and regulations in trade, and pose a competitive risk to the EU economic model of trade protectionism and high regulations. If the border was to be kept open, the UK could gain unfair access to EU markets, while the UK would have little to lose from EU goods imported through an open Irish border. Crucially, without the backstop, the EU would have to make the politically unpalatable decision to compel its member state the Republic of Ireland to impose physical controls along the Irish border. Otherwise, it would have to tolerate an undermining back door into its market shared by 27 countries; this situation seems unlikely considering the EU’s tight legal framework. The backstop absolves the EU from having to make that choice.
The backstop is constructed so that the UK holds the burden of the dilemma: a choice between its union or full control over its governance. Although the UK-wide customs union was the EU’s concession, in exchange it requires the UK to commit to a ‘level playing field’, explicitly preventing any competitive advantage in key areas of legislation. It is this which Brexit proponents have claimed is the ‘trap’, knowing that the majority in Parliament would always choose the union above all else, and bind the UK in a perpetual state of uncompetitiveness. While these measures attempt to prevent unfair, advantageous access to EU markets, it is vital to consider that other parties have their own political calculi that has to be manoeuvred. The Irish government has been dependent on other nationalist parties for their majority in the Dáil, and since the resignation of Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who favoured a more emollient bilateral approach to the border, their new Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has taken a harder line to bolster support from nationalists. All the while, the rest of the EU is trying to minimise the economic impacts and perceived advantages of Brexit as their priority, with Eurosceptic populist parties gaining ground all over Europe. In this light, it is not unexpected for them to be inclined towards interpretations and solutions to the Belfast Agreement problem that suit both their own agendas.
THE ECONOMIC WAR: cross-border trade on the island of Ireland has been a proxy for Anglo-Irish tensions. In the 1930s Economic War when the fledgling Irish Free State and UK exchanged blows in retaliatory trade measures, the economic risk was then posed by protectionist restrictions at both sides of a closed border. History is today mirrored: now the risk is of liberal deregulation at one side of an open border undermining the other.
The irony is that the Hobson’s choice offered by the EU, between the deeply unpalatable backstop or no-deal, is itself counterintuitively increasing the chance of a no-deal Brexit. The EU’s gamble is that the British parliament will do everything to avoid this; and indeed it has, already voting to extend the Brexit deadline twice. However, the unpredictable political atmosphere means a no deal Brexit cannot be ruled out, and in that case, the EU ends up arriving at the same unpalatable dilemma between border checks or tolerating some border porosity in Ireland. As we reach the endgame of only the first stage of the UK’s withdrawal, the entire affair has become a perverse, international diplomatic game of chicken, as each party wait for the others to fold, before Brexit can progress. As the can is kicked down the road again and again, the more uncertain the fate of Northern Ireland becomes, and the more prolonged the dread. The delicate balance of peace has been upended by Brexit, and rebuilding it will not be easy.
CODA — THE PEACE LINES: the streets of Belfast and other Northern Irish cities are scarred by fortified walls of reinforced concrete, corrugated steel, and barbed wire, dividing Protestant and Catholic communities in ‘interface’ neighbourhoods where they meet. Though not as iconic as their cousin in Berlin, the walls in Belfast are taller, more extensive and have stood for longer. In fact, they still stand today, with the oldest walls standing for almost 50 years. Known as ‘peace lines’ or ‘peace walls’, there is an ironic paradox inherent in their name — how can such militarised, defensive architecture ever create a genuine peace? Unlike the overwhelming resentment of the Berlin Wall by communities on both sides, the situation in Belfast is more ambiguous, with a growing substantial minority wishing for the walls to remain. Though intentions for segregation were originally to keep feuding communities safe from one other, there is also a subtext of containing the minority and obscuring the Other; they have served as architectural enablers of mutual suspicion, isolation and irreconciliation. While the Northern Ireland Executive has a target of removing all peace walls by 2023, there is little prospect of progress. With a substantial number of peace walls actually built after the paramilitary ceasefire and the Belfast Agreement, they illustrate a complicated and incomplete ‘peace’ the province is just about holding together. The combination of a sectarian urbanism in its walled cities with an absence of any wall on the Irish border forms the territorial oxymoron on which Northern Irish ‘peace’ is built, and its delicate illusion may be shattered. Seeking a substitute form of cognitive dissonance and constructive ambiguity to appease all parties again could become the new struggle of a generation.
