On Saturday morning, for the first time since 1169, the larger part of the island of Ireland woke up without a constitutional or political connection with the island of Britain. Right through the twentieth century Ireland either used sterling or was in the European Community with the UK (and up to 1949 was in the Commonwealth), both forms of institutional and constitutional connection. As I write all of that has ended. The institutions of the Good Friday Agreement entangle the two states in complex ways of course, but for reasons I will explain I think those have less general significance than is generally supposed. Over the long term I think this moment will prove to be really important, and I had some thoughts about how it affects Irish policy and strategy.
The core new fact is that Ireland is now a European country and the UK is not. I would go so far as to claim that fact is the determining strategic fact for Irish policy makers for the foreseeable future, more foundational than the ongoing relationship with the UK, mediated through the status of Northern Ireland, or the relationship with the US. Why do I think that? It is because the confederal structure of the European Union offers the best chance of ensuring the well-being of the population and provides the context that gives the community the best chance of collectively acting to solve our problems, advance our interests, and pursue our values (as we discover and articulate them).
The informing strategy of Irish international policy since the foundation of the state has been to support collective institutions. Sean Lester was the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, and there can hardly be a more telling illustration of commitment to the institutions of collective security than going down with that particular ship (though as Sam Moyn has explained, it was important to maintain the continuity of international organisations and jurisprudence, so this may not have been quite so Quixotic). The EU opens a much wider scope for that strategy and allows Ireland to have leverage on issues like climate change and international trade which otherwise would not be open to us.
Strategic choice imposes limits as well as opening opportunities. As the EU has confronted problems like the financial crash of 2008 it has assumed new executive functions. The scope of the European Council has widened as the competence of institutions like the ECB has extended. Europe is becoming a political reality and taking on a political nature, often in ways that have not been anticipated in the treaties. That dynamic is continuing. The new trade treaty with China is a geo-political move by Europe and if some collective response to managing relationships with Russia, North Africa, and the Middle East could be achieved, that would be a real success. If (when?) a crisis analogous to the Yugoslavian crisis were to emerge in the future it is hard to imagine Europe being as inert as it was in that moment. For Ireland, accepting that the EU will take on a military aspect will be difficult, but given the US commitment to NATO is no longer taken for granted, it is almost inevitable.
That is only one of the many ways in which threads of European experience will start to weave through Ireland and the other members of the EU and pull them closer together. The constitutional frameworks that reflect European rather than British experience, which are already present in Irish structures, will, I think, become more prominent. The rights-based model of citizenship, which is fundamentally French, has been hugely important in the development of the Republic, so too has the creation of a constitutional jurisprudence. Those features are much closer to the French model of "thick" citizenship and active democratic participation than the liberal British model. As the EU develops its political practice, and in particular works out how the larger and smaller states can work together effectively, that will open up real opportunities for Ireland to operate. Europe will never be a nation state, but pretty soon there will be questions asked about the relationship between democratic participation and the European executive and judiciary. The practice of whatever comes out of that moment is more likely to echo the early-modern comity of multiple monarchies, city states, and territorial republics of continental Europe, than the incorporating union of the United Kingdom with its much more unitary model of sovereignty.
As these dynamics make Ireland more constitutionally European, analogous to a state of the old Holy Roman Empire, it will pull it further away from the UK. This could cause real problems if there is any prospect of unity between the Republic and the North. Obviously any movement in that direction would have to be handled with enormous sensitivity and generosity. Unification would create a new entity, not simply absorb the North into the Republic. However core constitutional principles that align Ireland with the European Union, principally the model of citizenship, could not be compromised. The consociational model of representation that animates the Good Friday Agreement, is completely incompatible with the universalist model for citizenship that has been successful in creating a democratic order in the Republic and that aligns it with the EU. The entire premise of the Christian Democratic/Social Democrat model of citizenship is secularisation, which is much more than the separation of church and state. It pulls off the trick of creating a model of citizenship that has real consequence in terms of rights to participate in the public life of the community in all its aspects, supported by educational, welfare, health and other rights that enable that participation, and so is very "thick", but which is separated from the most profound identities and values of the individuals. More liberal models of citizenship are thinner (more concentrated on protecting property rights) and populism rejects secularisation and demands unitary identity as a condition of citizenship.
The Republic was interesting, and odd, because even when the population was overwhelmingly Catholic, formal secularisation was sustained, and the difference between the citizen and the believer was respected (I realise that is a deeply theoretical position and the dominance of Catholic values and institutional perspectives is obvious for most practical purposes, but the secular norm was always there and was the ground for much of the change of the last forty years). That univeralist model of citizenship has become more important in recent years as Ireland has become a country of immigration.You can't simultaneously have a consociational and universalist model of citizenship. And this is why I don't think the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement are going to operate as a bridge between the Republic and the UK. They only have reference to the special conditions of Northern Ireland and cannot have sustained constitutional purchase.
If Scotland secedes from the UK this constitutional problem will come to a head as the sustainability of the UK as an entity will then be in question and I doubt that in those circumstances England will sustain the transfers necessary to maintain reasonable standards of living in Northern Ireland. That would be a political circumstance that would bring the issue of Northern Ireland to a head (there are many others that could do the same thing of course). It is completely predictable that a body of Unionist opinion will only assent to a United Ireland on consociational grounds and that is likely to be unacceptable to the majority of Irish citizens, for whom being citizens is a big deal.
This circumstance, where the UK is no longer capable of sustaining Northern Ireland, but no agreement is possible on a set of constitutional principles for a Second Republic, seems to me to be the greatest medium-term strategic threat to Ireland. If my thinking is right, and the core interest of Ireland is in its engagment with and full membership of the EU, then that is the criterion that we should use to guide ourselves through the predictable constitutional politics of the new decade. I think that being clear about that would also be helpful to the communities of Northern Ireland, who also face a very changed circumstance. In imagining a United Ireland everything would not be on the table, and a Northern Ireland trying to find safe harbour for all of its peoples deserves to know that.
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