At the end of World War I, Winston Churchill watched Europe rise from beneath the floodwaters, its borders redrawn, its monarchies toppled. One soggy patch of soil, however, had not changed. “As the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm.”
Exactly a century later, as the pandemic recedes, Northern Ireland is again locked in its ancient quarrel. This time, though, that quarrel has the capacity to wreck relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union, and so cripple the Western alliance.
It is fashionable, especially in the United States, to put the blame squarely on Boris Johnson. Brexit, runs the argument, meant that there had to be a customs border between the U.K. and the EU. Either that border must divide Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland, or it must cut Northern Ireland off from the rest of the U.K. Either way, one of the two communities was going to be upset.
While there is a smidgen of truth in this analysis, it wholly ignores the EU’s role. Brussels is not a passive observer here. On the contrary, it has been prepared, quite calculatedly, to jeopardize the stability in Northern Ireland so as to punish Britain for Brexit.
Let’s recall how we got here. After the Brexit vote in 2016, the EU said it would not discuss a trade deal with the U.K. unless London promised that goods in Northern Ireland would match EU standards. London argued that an ambitious trade deal including mutual recognition would make that issue redundant. But Eurocrats wanted the U.K. to be seen to suffer. The official in charge of the negotiations was reported to have told colleagues that Northern Ireland would be the “price” Britain paid.
Brussels negotiators were initially nervous about making such an outrageous demand. Imagine, after all, how Americans would react if Canada demanded that Ohio should impose customs checks on purchases from the rest of the U.S. and that any disputes should be settled by Canadian courts, not by neutral arbitrators.
At first, Britain and Ireland began to work on technical solutions that would render the border invisible. But in 2017, a year after the Brexit referendum, a general election in Britain returned an anti-Brexit majority. Europhile members of Parliament encouraged Brussels to offer terms so harsh that Britain might drop the whole idea of Brexit. In the most shocking abuse of parliamentary procedure since the 17th century, they paralyzed the government while simultaneously refusing to allow a general election.
In the end, Johnson had to agree to the EU’s demands in order to break the deadlock. It was, as his Brexit minister Lord David Frost put it, “a moment of EU overreach when the U.K.’s negotiating hand was tied.”
Now Johnson has a majority, and he could tear the treaty up. Yet, contrary to the impression given in most media, he has no intention of doing so. Rather, he proposes to use a measure within the treaty specifically intended for moments like this. Article 16 allows either side to take unilateral safeguard measures “if the application of this Protocol leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade.”
No one denies that these conditions have been met. Northern Ireland works on the basis that any major change needs the consent of both the British-unionist and the Irish-nationalist communities, yet the protocol is opposed by everyone in the Unionist Party. The EU is vindictively applying fully 20% of all the checks it carries out on goods entering its territory are applied to the 0.5% of goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, resulting in a massive “diversion of trade.”
Earlier this year, Brussels invoked Article 16 from no higher motive than pique at the relative success of Britain’s vaccination program. True, it backed down, but the fact remains that Brussels wanted to impose a border in Ireland — something the U.K. has never contemplated. All Johnson wants is to ease some of the more senseless and punitive checks being imposed on goods within the U.K.
I have been in politics long enough to know when a story has passed the point of correction. The idea of a populist and irresponsible Johnson versus a dull and bureaucratic EU is impossible to remove from one’s head, but facts are facts. With a modicum of goodwill, the two parties could have negotiated a more moderate application of the protocol. In the absence of such goodwill, Britain has no option but to subordinate good relations with Brussels to its first responsibility: maintaining stability in Northern Ireland.
