The rest of the world has largely made up its mind about the Northern Ireland Protocol, the arrangement that the European Union demanded as the price of Brexit. The story, for most overseas observers, goes something like this:
“Britain promised under the original peace deal to keep the Irish border open. Because leaving the EU means having a different customs and regulatory regime, there has to be a border somewhere. In order to preserve the peace in Ireland, the EU insisted that Northern Ireland be treated, for regulatory purposes, as part of its own market, meaning that checks on goods take place between Great Britain and Northern Ireland rather than between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Now, Boris Johnson is trying to renege on the deal.”
I recognize how embedded that narrative is, especially in the United States, the commentators of which, however Anglophile in other respects, are primed to side against Britain in any Irish context. Still, every element of it is false.
First, there is already a border in Ireland. It was imposed in 1921 by the provisional government in Dublin (in defiance of London, the preference of which, at that moment, was for some kind of all-Ireland polity loosely linked to Britain). In recent years, that border has been made unobtrusive. But there has always been a demarcation of jurisdiction, with different taxes and regulations on either side.
Second, the settlement that governs relations between the U.K. and Ireland, the 1998 Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement) does not commit either side to keep the border open. Checks at the border have in fact been ordered twice since it was signed, in 2001 during a foot-and-mouth outbreak and in 2020 during the lockdown, both times by Dublin, not London.
Critics could do worse than to read the Belfast Agreement. Although it has nothing to say about borders, it has a lot to say about consent. Among other things, it lays down that, for as long as Northern Irish voters choose to be in the U.K., major constitutional issues should require the approval of both communities.
The protocol destroys that principle by establishing a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. Quite apart from the economic costs — Northern Ireland sells more to Great Britain than to Ireland, the rest of the EU, and the rest of the world combined — Unionists see it as a threat to their British identity and a breach of the consent principle. As long as the protocol remains in place, Unionists will not participate in the power-sharing institutions, which makes the basis of the Belfast Agreement void. David Trimble, who won the Nobel Peace Prize as the co-author of the Belfast Agreement, keeps explaining that, far from guaranteeing it, the Northern Ireland Protocol wrecks it.
Third, the protocol was intended to be temporary. The EU insisted on it as an insurance policy in case there was no trade deal with the U.K. But such a trade deal has now been signed — the most comprehensive between the EU and any nonapplicant state.
Fourth, the protocol is causing needless economic problems. The EU, which has still not overcome its pique about Brexit, carries out fully 20% of its checks on goods entering its territory on the less than 0.5% of goods that cross from Great Britain into Northern Ireland. It has been calculatedly vindictive, at one stage insisting that pets from England and Scotland carry certificates for rabies, a disease long eradicated from Britain, though not from the EU. After a year of fruitless discussions, the U.K. now intends to disapply the most harmful aspects of the protocol, an action anticipated within the protocol itself.
Fifth, this was done, albeit briefly, in January 2021 by the EU, from no higher motive than irritation because Britain’s vaccine rollout was going more quickly than its own. The European Commission sought to ban the export of vaccines and briefly ordered that a border be imposed in Ireland to stop them escaping, the border being the very thing the protocol was notionally supposed to prevent.
Britain could have reacted in kind, but it chose to keep talking. Sixteen months on, the talks have gotten nowhere. Johnson now proposes to take proportionate action to defend the prosperity and stability of Northern Ireland while meeting the EU’s stated objective of ensuring that no unauthorized goods cross the border.
Will Brussels choose to escalate, at the very moment that the U.K. is doing the heavy lifting in Ukraine? Possibly. Doing so would hurt both sides and divide the West. But if we have learned one thing about the EU, it is that its dislike of secession trumps every other consideration. Let’s see.
