Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’
Gormley-Heenan, C. & Aughey, A. (2017) Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, DOI: 10.1177/1369148117711060
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Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’
Cathy Gormley-Heenan and Arthur Aughey
Abstract:For those who spoke on behalf of leave voters, the result on 23 June 2016meant the people of the United Kingdom taking back ‘control’ or getting their ‘own country back’. However, two parts of the UK did not vote leave: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here the significant counterpoint to ‘taking back control is ‘waking up in a different country’ and this sentiment has unique political gravity. Its unique gravity involves two distinct but intimately related matters. The first concerns the politics of identity. The vote was mainly, if not entirely, along nationalist/unionist lines, confirming an old division: unionists were staking a ‘British’ identity by voting leave, and nationalists an Irish one by voting remain. The second concerns borders. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998 meant taking the border out of Irish politics. Brexit means the border between the EU and the UK running across the island as a sovereign ‘frontier’. Though this second matter is discussed mainly in terms of the implications for free movement of people and goods, we argue that it is freighted with meanings of identity. Brexit involves a ‘border in the mind’, those shifts in self-understanding, individually and collectively, attendant upon the referendum. This article examines this ‘border in the mind’ according to its effects on identity, politics and the constitution and their implications for political stability in Northern Ireland.
Keywords: Brexit; Northern Ireland; peace process; identity; constitution.
Introduction
One prominent (pro-Leave) journalist wrote of the EU referendum result (Moore, 2016) that the question which should be asked of all aspiring political leaders is: ‘Who understands that everything has changed, changed utterly?’ Of one thing he was certain: ‘Brexit is not, primarily, a negotiation, but a new path.’ The claim was a large one: that somethingsubstantial and important had taken place, that a shadow line had been crossed between one sensibility and another and that the world felt different now. How was that change appreciated? It was understood broadly in two ways. For those who spoke on behalf of Leave, the result meant that people of the United Kingdom (UK) had taken back ‘control’ or had got their ‘own country back’. If the former was more frequently heard on the lips of Conservatives (Gove, 2016) and the latter more commonly proclaimed by members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) (O’Flynn, 2016), the sense was more or less the same: the referendum result meant the recovery of national self-determination. On 24 June in Boston, Lincolnshire (which had recorded the strongest support for leave) a UKIP poster demanding ‘we want our country back’ was amended to read ‘we got our country back’ (Chakelian, 2016). For those who spoke on behalf of Remain, the meaning of result was succinctly captured by one journalist (Freedland, 2016): they had ‘woken up in a different country. The Britain that existed until 23 June 2016 will not exist anymore’. This commonly expressed feeling conveyed a deep sense of personal as well as collective loss. As another journalist put it (Behr, 2016), they now barely recognised their own country having become suddenly ‘the stateless tribe of Remainia’. In Twickenham (which recorded a Remain majority) someone was moved to write: ‘we are the 48% and want our country back’ (Goss, 2016). Such declarations capture the drama of the momentbut they also help to make the political ‘weather’.
Comparison with the previous referendum on Europe in 1975 reveals the extent to which things have changed. All regions and countries of the UK - with the exception of Shetlands and the Western Isles – voted to stay within the (then) European Economic Community (EEC). At the time, the concern in Westminster had been that Northern Ireland, along with Scotland, would be distinctive by voting against membership. Of course, this was the UK as the ‘Westminster model’. This UK certainly does not exist any longer and if a Leave vote was about recovering the old order, that model was not available. In 2016, not only is the constitutional structure of the UK modified by devolution but also attitudes toward the EU are fragmented regionally. Scotland and Northern Ireland now do take a different position from England and Wales. 60% of voters in Scotland and 54% in Northern Ireland voted Remain. Brexit changes the context, not only relations between the EU and the UK but also relations between Scotland, Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The people have voted. Yes, but who are the people? This article examines the case of Northern Ireland and considers three consequences of the referendum result. The first explores the matter of the border but does so in a distinctive way through the idea of the ‘border in the mind’. This idea establishes the context for reflecting on three related ‘effects’: identity effects, political effects and constitutional effects.
Border matters
The spectre haunting Brexit has a unique reference point in Northern Ireland: the border. The border was the speculative focus even though it figured little in the original calculation to hold a referendum (Douglas-Scott, 2015: 4). There are three aspects to the border question. During the referendum campaign, only two of them attracted much comment but the argument of this article is that the third is fundamental. The first concerns the ‘what’ of border; the second concerns the ‘where’ of the border; and the third concerns what we call ‘the border in the mind’.
The question - what sort of border? – involves a simple option: will Brexit mean the continuation of a ‘soft’ border or will it mean the imposition of a ‘hard’ border between the two parts of the island? The trading openness of the north/south border - because of British and Irish membership of the EU single market, a British/Irish common travel area and the demilitarisation of the border following the end of the Troubles - meant that by June 2016 ‘the physical manifestation of the Irish border itself is hardly discernible and there is freedom of movement across it’ (eudebateni.org, 2016: 11). These developments had made the border - that central focus of Irish politics throughout the twentieth century - the softest of soft boundaries, more a crossing than a barrier. The Irish Ambassador to the UK (Mulhall, 2016: 21) argued that common membership ofthe EU had been the framework within whichborderpolitics had been transformed. His shorthand for this changewas the EU ‘context’. In sum, though the EU had been peripheral to the actual negotiation of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998, it was the larger context which facilitated the outworking of that Agreement, especially in and around the border itself. A dedicated North-South body- the Special European Union Programmes Body - implemented the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, allocating 2.3 billion euros of funding (Tonge, 2017). That Brexit would obviously intimate physical controls at the border became a central plank of Remain’s campaign. Its Chair, Tom Kelly (2016) claimed that it stretched credulity to believe that there would be no disruption to trade and movement. The Irish ambassador (Mulhall, 2016: 24) explained to the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee the politics of ‘context’: ‘improved north-south relations, also facilitated by EU membership, were part of the overall fabric of the process in which both countries are successfully engaged and have been engaged now for more than 20 years’. Indeed, a very similar point was made by Mulhall’s counterpart, the UK’s ambassador to Ireland, who also warned (Chilcott, 2016) of the practical effects of Brexit on relationships within Ireland and between Ireland and the UK. Brexit could involve either some customs controls, for example on EU rules on the origin of products or formal passport controls compromising, and perhaps ending, the common travel area between the Republic of Ireland and the UK.
One senior figure in the Leave campaign, Lord Lawson, did acknowledge this as a possibility (BBC, 2016: 5). Mainly however, a hard border has been rejected by Brexit supporters. For example, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers (2016), argued that there was ‘no reason why the UK’s only land border should be any less open after Brexit than it is today’. Democratic Unionist MPs also took that line as well. Gavin Robinson (2016: 39) did not foresee any change to the border because the ‘UK and the Republic of Ireland already have border arrangements of co-operation because we both lie outside Schengen, so we both look after one another and co-operate quite closely outside of what is a unified European Union border process’. One post-referendum report (Polley and Hoey, 2017: 7) claimed that because the British and Irish governments already collaborate extensively on immigration and other matters ‘automated border clearance systems have made the need for disruptive customs checks redundant, even where so-called “hard borders” exist’. Indeed, the intention of Prime Minister May (Parker, 2017) is to have a ‘seamless’ or ‘frictionless’ border, a principle written into the UK's letter to the President of the European Council triggering Article 50 (BBC News, 2017).
The second question concerns the where of the border? When Brexit happens, where would the controls (of whatever kind) be? Would they be along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (as much of the debate assumed); Or would they between the island of Ireland as a whole and Great Britain? If keeping a ‘soft’ or ‘electronic’ border in Ireland between north and south was deemed important, imposing a ‘hard’ border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain might be necessary. The answer was important mainly (if not exclusively) for Unionists who feared not only distinguishing Northern Ireland symbolically from the rest of the UK but also returning Northern Ireland to its quasi-quarantined status of the early Troubles. Indeed, the Chair of Stronger In thought that it was bizarre to watch and listen to ‘some of the most vociferous unionists from all parties taking cavalier risks with the Union they profess so much loyalty to’ (Belfast Telegraph, 2016a). The Ulster Unionist (UUP) leader at the time, Mike Nesbitt (2016a: 3-4),designated the question a major ‘existential’ threat to the UK. His reasoning was that if the UK government’s emphasis was on a seamless border on the island, then the border ‘is more likely to be at Stranraer, Cairnryan, Heathrow, Gatwick, our ports and our airports’. Leave supporters proposed a double dismissal: dismissal of concerns about the ‘where’ of the border and dismissal of concerns about the ‘what’ of the border. Hard border or soft border, north/south or east/west, little or nothing would change. This propositionwas curious since Leave also proposed that Brexit would change everything for the UK’s relations with the EU and the rest of the world.
The former UUP leader, David (Lord) Trimble (McBride, 2016),was confident that the question of the border was manageable. His argument was historical, noting that Northern Ireland had had for fifty years arrangements that would exist, post-Brexit: ‘from 1920 until we joined the European Union there was a border where there were [trade] tariffs there and people moved back [and forth] and there was never any serious problem’. Moreover, ‘there was a long time in which we were not in the European Union and there were different tariffs – in fact, largely imposed by Dublin – and that didn’t cause any problems’. Trimble was historically correct about a hard border between the island of Ireland and Great Britain during the Second World War. To remove it required compromise and agreement on immigration control between London and Dublin which, after 1952, became known as the ‘common travel area’. This was a pragmatic approach by both states which delivered effective management of immigration between them. However, as Ryan’s comprehensive review of the common travel area shows, its success is due to a combination of historical factors which do not necessarily ensure its easy continuation. He concluded (2001: 874): ‘The apparent continuities in the history of the common travel area should not mask the extent to which it now faces a qualitatively new set of pressures’. One of them will be Brexit. The belief that we have been here before and that nothing is going to change, glosses over not only the diplomatic and practical complexities but also the imaginative impact on different constituencies in Northern Ireland. This brings into play the third understanding of the border: ‘the border in the mind’.
The border in the mind
In 1966 the historian, J. C. Beckett, argued in the conclusion to his History of Modern Ireland that the real border in Ireland is not on the map ‘but in the minds of men’. The irony to which he was alluding was that partition in 1921 had actually provided a period of stability which no one had expected but which might contribute eventually towards removing that ‘border in the mind’. Beckett’s was not a call for Irish unity but an intimation of what John Hume was later to call an ‘agreed Ireland’. Ironically, the book was published just on the eve of the recentconflict in Northern Ireland, a thirty year period of instability which fewhad expected and which made the border in the mind deeper than before. The 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was intended to institutionalise a new stability, to end political violence and, as many hoped, to ‘decommission the mind-set’ of division. In short, the hope invested in the Agreement was a wager on ‘taking the border out of Irish politics’. This hope did not mean unification but a progressive lowering of the political temperature in Northern Ireland and the fashioning of a new modus vivendi on the island. It meant shifting the focus away from the ‘ends’ of politics – removing the border or securing the border – to the ‘means’ of politics – not only what was known colloquially as ‘bread and butter’ issues of individual and collective welfare but also doing so under the governing principle of consent (Aughey, 2007). In short, here was the outline of that ‘agreed Ireland’.
One can legitimately criticise as dysfunctional the institutional arrangements and governing practices established in the two decades since 1998, but it is also possible to defend that (paradoxically) utilitarian dysfunction in the name of a higher function, namely embedding the principle of consent in the political culture. Elsewhere we have used the analogy of the ‘drystone wall’ to illustrate this (Aughey and Gormley-Heenan, 2011: 10-12) – a craft of building walls using locally found stones that interlock and support each other without the use of mortar to bind them together. The purpose of the analogy is to point out that political arrangements are perhaps best understood not as grand architectural designs or blueprints but as dry stone walls, using the political building materials locally to hand in a rough and ready but nevertheless intelligently constructive manner. From this perspective, the eccentricities, irregularities, even the dysfunctional characteristics of the Agreement are actually necessary. They are not ‘set in stone’ and are open to change but care has to be taken about the arrangement of the political dry stone wall. This is starkly the case in Northern Ireland for there is no guarantee that the delicate structure will not fall apart. There is no ideological mortar – common national identity - holding things together. The dry stonewall analogy provides insight on how the elements contributing to Northern Ireland’s political stability ‘stand in relation’ to one another and issensitive to their delicate assembly.
The first ‘standing in relation’ may be described as Lampedusa’s paradox. It can be stated thus. For unionists, if things are to stay the same (the Union continues and majority consent is affirmed), things will have to change (executive authority shared with nationalists and republicans as well as an all-Ireland dimension). For nationalists, if things are to change (a possible transition to Irish unity),then things will have to stay the same (unity can only be achieved on the basis of Unionist consent which means continuity of Northern Ireland’s place within the Union). The essential point to note is that the principle of consent in this paradox involves mutuality. It means not only that nationalists consent to Northern Ireland remaining within the UK but also their consent is required for the sort of Northern Ireland that remains in the UK. This standing in relation is precarious but there was evidence that a new Beckett-like stability was beginning to emerge. For example, despite its difficult beginnings with frequent suspensions and snap elections, the Northern Ireland Assembly had served its first full term of office from 2011-2016 under the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin.