Post-Brexit, the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain is the rock on which all other arrangements must crash.
Ever since Brexit was on the table, there has always been the niggling matter of how to treat Northern Ireland. If Brexit meant leaving the customs union and effecting the U.K.’s own trade arrangements then it could mean introducing a hard customs border to the island of Ireland.
Theresa May, and Boris Johnson after her, immediately accepted that something needed to be different about the way Northern Ireland was treated. So they negotiated the Northern Ireland Protocol, which effectively puts a customs border within the United Kingdom itself, in the Irish Sea. This also has the effect of breaking the connection between Northern Irish voters and their economic governance.
Unionists have revolted and have refused to occupy the post–Good Friday power-sharing arrangements at the Stormont Assembly in Belfast. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden wants to visit Ireland and celebrate the 25th anniversary of those agreements, which American diplomats helped broker. He wants those institutions working first. And so Ireland, the U.K., and the EU have all gone into negotiations again. And they aren’t going well.
The reason for that is simple. The parties in this negotiation do not have one common fear.
The Irish most fear any hard border on the island of Ireland, and they don’t want to disrupt promiscuous North–South commerce on it. They would be happy to see the U.K. align to EU rules in a kind of softened Brexit (a Norway-like option), or they’d accept a kind of benign neglect for customs in Northern Ireland, effectively making the island a special hub for U.K.–EU business.
Northern Irish Unionists most fear any customs border between themselves and their countrymen in Great Britain. They argue that it violates the Act of Union and further argue (correctly in my view) that it violates the Good Friday Agreement, and their democracy. They would accept a hard border on the island of Ireland. They would also accept a benign neglect so long as their economic arrangements were governed within the U.K. and not by the EU in which they have no political part, post-Brexit.
The Tory-led U.K. government most fears anything that looks like reneging on a full Brexit, a move that would bring down the wrath of backbenchers and the return of Nigel Farage to haunt them. They also would like there to be no hard border in Ireland — for good bilateral relations. But most of all they wish to survive.
The EU most fears a leaky customs border at the periphery of the EU. They would prefer to keep the Northern Irish protocol. But, in a jam, they would accept a hard border in Ireland. Having initially cast themselves as Ireland’s ally in the negotiation, however, they want the blame for that to fall squarely and wholly on the United Kingdom. The EU is now faced with appearing to stick up for a member state, only to turn against it.
Right now, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is right to sense that to get a deal done, one party or another has to drop its red lines. Interestingly, he throws that gauntlet down before the EU and argues for a “bespoke arrangement.” In other words, the Good Friday Agreement trumps your perfectly sealed customs union.
In the original negotiations, it was Ireland and the E.U. negotiating against the U.K. But if anyone’s red line in the negotiation weakens, the other parties will quickly converge on their second-best but still acceptable options. That could mean Ireland and the U.K. making joint demands of the EU.
It will be interesting to see who blinks first. I personally doubt the French and Germans, already pretty sore at Ireland over taxes and tech, will be the first. I initially doubted that the United Kingdom could ever consent to running an EU customs border within its own territory and dividing its own subjects from one another. They did, and it failed. And I think the Unionists are correct that the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain is the rock on which all other arrangements must crash. This is still a Westphalian world.