Foreign Affairs : The Backstory, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Brexit ...

 

April 9, 2023  |  View in Browser Welcome to The Backstory. Every Sunday, we’ll guide you through the debates driving U.S. foreign policy and international affairs using pieces from the Foreign Affairs archives—some recent, some decades old.

This week, U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders will travel to Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to decades of violent conflict in the region. Although the peace still holds, sectarian tensions endure—and Brexit has revived questions about Northern Ireland’s status and its future as part of the United Kingdom.   The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union threatened the country’s already weakening foundations, Fintan O’Toole writes. For Northern Ireland, Brexit had the potential to reinstate a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member—a move that would have undermined key pillars of the 1998 peace accord. With reunification of the island on the table as a key provision of the Good Friday Agreement, O’Toole observed on The Foreign Affairs Interview, Northern Ireland has “already been psychologically semi-detached—and Brexit has added to that.”

Disunited Kingdom Will Nationalism Break Britain? Fintan O’Toole

The island of Ireland has been partitioned since 1921, when the majority-Protestant and unionist Northern Ireland and the majority-Catholic and nationalist Irish Free State—later the Republic of Ireland—came into being. By 1972, when the Irish politician John Lynch wrote an essay on the roots of Ireland’s political instability, Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic populations were in violent conflict, and the British government had deployed its soldiers to try to keep the peace. There were aspects of Northern Ireland, Lynch argued, that had made it “unsuitable from the outset”—most significantly, that in its creation, “religious differences were publicly accepted as a basis for political division.” Moreover, he wrote presciently, the “larger and still outstanding question” is how to ensure good relations between Ireland and the United Kingdom—granted that “the division of Ireland has not worked; and that the incorporation of Northern Ireland, or any part of it, fully within the United Kingdom cannot work.”

The Anglo-Irish Problem John M. Lynch

Violence in Northern Ireland only worsened over the course of the decade, prompting the Northern Irish nationalist politician John Hume, in 1979, to call for the British and the Irish to take “each other—and our common crisis—seriously.” The “perennial British view of the problem as ‘their quarrel’ and not ‘ours’ is fundamentally wrong,” he argued. “Britain is, in fact, included in the quarrel as a central protagonist, and must be centrally involved in the solution.” Hume would later become one of the key architects of the Good Friday Agreement, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with the British politician David Trimble.

The Irish Question: A British Problem John Hume

By the mid-1980s, the British government and the Irish government were working together to bring peace to Northern Ireland, marking a shift away from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s hard-line unionist stance. But William Shannon, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, cautioned patience, writing that it “may be the end of the century before it finally becomes clear how far Northern Ireland has drifted from its old habits of conflict.”    When the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed in April 1998, the writer John Lloyd expressed a similar caution, warning that the accord’s success was rooted in “its very looseness and ambiguity.” The deal “preserved many ambiguities about the status of Northern Ireland and the durability of the link with the United Kingdom,” giving “the union with Great Britain a new lease on life by rooting it explicitly in what it always required for its stability—the will of the majority to continue it.”

Ireland’s Uncertain Peace John Lloyd

The 2016 Brexit vote underscored the fragility of the relationships among Belfast, Dublin, and London—and the instability of a common British national identity. EU membership had drawn the “poison out of the relationship” between Ireland and the United Kingdom, Henry Farrell wrote in 2016, but the political and economic pressures of Brexit could “destabilize the uncertain peace” between nationalists and unionists. Brexit has also made the prospect of Northern Ireland’s reunification with the Republic of Ireland, once unthinkable, now plausible, Daniel Finn noted in 2019. Alongside demographic trends that are closing the gap between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority, “the shock of a chaotic Brexit could push more voters to embrace Irish unity as a safer option than remaining tethered to the United Kingdom.”

The Irish Question The Consequences of Brexit Henry Farrell

Today, although London has resolved some of the problems Brexit posed to Northern Ireland, the vote to leave the EU still complicates the relationships among Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the greater United Kingdom. Although the region is “technically at peace,” Jonathan Stevenson wrote in 2019, “traumatic memories, individual and collective, have fueled competitive, ancestral outrage . . . keeping society divided, cross-community rhetoric vitriolic and sectarian, and a dormant conflict at risk of reigniting.” In this post-Brexit world, Northern Ireland fits awkwardly, Matthias Matthijs observes—prompting the question of “how long the United Kingdom can in fact remain united.”

Sunak’s EU Reset How the United Kingdom Hopes to Mend Fences With Europe Matthias Matthijs