The entire process of Brexit will seem a little odd to most Americans. You had an all-out and bloody war last time some people decided to secede from the United States. We in the United Kingdom just had a vote and a few arguments about the details of how we will leave the European Union.
One of which is mystifying even to most Europeans, the arguments over the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The latter will remain part of the EU (although, to be honest, possibly not for all that long) while the former will leave along with the rest of the U.K. The problem here is that this will be the only land border between those newly outside the EU and those still inside the EU.
Tax regimes, customs, import tariffs, product regulations, etc., will be different on each side of that line, just as they are between, say, Poland and Belarus, inside and outside the EU. The insistence is therefore that there should be a border with passport checks, customs inspections, officials examining everything, and so on.
That runs into the agreement which ended the centurieslong low-level civil war on the island of Ireland. That, the Good Friday agreement, insists that there won’t be such a border.
Various solutions are suggested. For example, what if the U.K. didn’t really leave or if it did so in name only, keeping all the same customs, tax, residence, and other rules of the EU. Another possibility is that Northern Ireland doesn’t leave the EU, meaning it wouldn’t really be part of the U.K. anymore.
The best solution, in my opinion, is that we just lie about it. We English have been doing that to Ireland for a long time. But this is also rational.
There is actually no border there on the ground separating Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. There’re no geographic features which delineate most of it. It’s not even a historic border of provinces. It’s just the old county lines. Spike Milligan’s novel Puckoon has the border running through a pub, which is an exaggeration with different beer prices on each side of the room, plus different closing times. But there certainly are farms where the barn is in another country, and villages are split down the middle. There’s no there where the border nominally is in most cases. We had most of the British Army there for decades trying to seal it, and they couldn’t manage it.
Which is why lying is so attractive as an option. If the EU insists that, to maintain the different jurisdictions, there must be a “hard” border, then we just say, “Righty-oh.” There it is, there’s the border as on the map, we declare it to be a hard border. Then do nothing else at all. If you like, it’s basically the Mexican reaction to President Trump’s insistence on a wall. The British could say to the EU, “You want one? You go build one, we’re done already.”
This might not be honest, possibly not even honorable. But it would indeed work. Which is what diplomacy is about, isn’t it? Going abroad to lie for your country?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
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