Cross-Border Cooperation as Conflict Transformation

Promises and Limitations in EU Peacebuilding

Maria-Adriana Deiana, Milena Komarova, Cathal McCall, Maria-Adriana Deiana, Milena Komarova, Cathal McCall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000546361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Has European integration helped to build peace in Europe and its neighbourhood? The book addresses this question through theoretically and empirically informed case studies that explore the successes of, and the challenges to EU cross-border cooperation as a tool for conflict transformation.

Conceptually, the contributors link the question of transforming conflict to changing understandings of borders and bordering. Empirically, the contributions represent case studies of practices and discourses of EU-sponsored cross-border cooperation, and challenges to it. The case studies encompass the multiple geographical perspectives of the EU internal boundaries, its (sometimes disputed) external borders, and borders involving third countries. From a thematic point of view, the collection focuses on the intersection of two levels at which bordering processes unfold and are enacted: the level of governance, devolution and international intervention and that of grass roots or civil society efforts, including cultural cooperation and artistic production. The collection thus offers a kaleidoscopic view of border politics and conflict that zooms in and out of the EU frontiers and their geopolitics of peacebuilding, security and cooperation.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Geopolitics.

The Irish Border as a European Union Frontier: The Implications for Managing Mobility and Conflict

Milena Komarova and Katy Hayward

ABSTRACT

The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement defined the conflict in Northern Ireland as being over the border between this part of the United Kingdom (UK) and the Republic of Ireland. This article defines and understands the Agreement as one of a number of ‘border regimes’ that operate between the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland and, in doing so, seeks to explain how it is that Brexit has such significant implications for the management of conflict and mobility here. Against the backdrop of the European Union’s (EU’s) external border regimes, we argue that the most significant point about border regimes is not inclusion/exclusion across a state border but hierarchies of rights and treatment within a jurisdiction. This helps illustrate why it is that the UK’s withdrawal from the EU holds such significance for the peace process in Northern Ireland and for mobility within and across the islands of Ireland and Great Britain more broadly.

Introduction

The Brexit debate in the United Kingdom (UK), especially in the run-up to the referendum, focused on the movement of people. In particular, Leave campaigners emphasized the desire to ‘take back control of borders’, by which they meant ‘to reduce immigration’. This logic quickly ran into difficulties after the referendum in the face of two main obstacles: first, the European Union’s (EU’s) insistence that the four ‘freedoms of movement’¹ are inseparable, which means that there could be no freedom of movement of goods without freedom of movement of people; and second, the problem of the border on the isle of Ireland between Northern Ireland (as a part of the UK) to the north and the Irish Republic to the south. This is a border across which the UK government is keen to see continuation of free movement of British and Irish citizens but which would become, post-Brexit, an external border of the EU. What is more, if the UK as a whole left the Single Market without providing for bespoke arrangements for Northern Ireland, the Irish border would become a border that the EU would have to manage and reinforce as a boundary to the four freedoms. Thus, the same rights and movement – people, goods, services, capital – could not then be enjoyed on the northern side of the UK–Ireland border as on the southern side.

The UK government has approached the Brexit negotiations as if it were the task for a singular, undifferentiated state; this is entirely reasonable at one level, seeing as the referendum created a slim UK-wide majority for Leave, given the size of the English population compared to the Remain-voting Scotland and Northern Ireland. The rationale for the UK government’s ‘One Nation’ approach is entirely compatible with the nationalism that propelled the Leave vote in the first place. Such Anglo-centric nationalism sees borders as lines of inclusion/exclusion that can be quite straightforwardly managed. This reflects a conception of the British people as being an ‘island race’, surrounded by sea and with clearly demarcated boundaries to the nation (Whittaker 2017). Such a form of nationalism sits very uneasily with the experience of other regions of the UK and, more specifically, with the existence of a UK land border and with the realities of the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA), which maintains a very different version of sovereignty and border management – one that comes from the tradition of EU rather than British Empire. In this EU/1998 Agreement approach, national borders are not so much sharp lines of division but meeting places between states. The best way of understanding the UK–Ireland border is as a site of integration and cooperation, not as a crossing point between jurisdictions that can be easily managed.

In what follows, we first introduce the kind of popular understanding of borders that formed the backdrop to the 2016 UK Referendum on exiting the EU. We then position our own use of the concept of ‘border regimes’ within the broader field of border studies and explain its relevance to the paper’s focus. Since we borrow this concept from Berg and Ehin (2006), we detail their understanding of its three analytical elements, i.e. function, governance and openness. Using these elements, we demonstrate that, despite recent efforts towards close coordination, the EU external border regime is characterized by inconsistency and variation; this variation may serve as a precedent for the model of the transformed UK–Ireland border as an external EU border. We then outline the layers of concentric border regimes that have shaped this border historically.

Border regimes demonstrate the diffuse operation of borders as networked systems of rules that regulate behaviour and are activated by the mobility of people and things at a variety of scales. The border regimes of the UK–Ireland border also show that the internal UK political and legal space is already characterized by differentiation. On this basis, we discuss the implications of Brexit for the future of these ‘Irish border regimes’. In our conclusions, we maintain that the concept of ‘border regimes’ illuminates the multilayered complexity of borders in contemporary Europe, and why it is that a simplistic understanding of the UK–Ireland border is dangerously inadequate. Our analysis builds upon our academic and policy research work on Brexit and the Irish land border in which we have been engaged since the 2016 UK Referendum on leaving the EU.

Popular Discourses of Borders as Sites of Sovereignty and Barriers to Mobility

Contemporary border studies understand and describe borders not in terms of barriers but in terms of mobilities across borders (Pickering and Weber 2006; Mountz, Coddington and Catania 2012; Richardson 2013). Kolossov and Scott (2013, 7), for instance, write:

While state-centredness remains an important way of conceptualizing borders and their significance (…) the world is increasingly composed of relational networks rather than only fixed spaces (…) fluidity of movement along global networks, takes little account of fixed borders.

Within this context of increasing flows (not least in terms of digital communications and financial transactions), Latham (2014) conceives borders as ‘striking sites’ where bodies, mobility and information intersect. Public attention on this intersection is often preoccupied with how the movement of people across state borders is governed.

The pro-Brexit movement in the UK was but one manifestation of an increasing tendency for populist rhetoric on ‘stronger borders’ to find fertile soil in the mainstream media and political parties. In a European context, official, public and media discourses on the pan-European ‘migration crisis’ appeared to reach new heights in 2015, after a period of particularly intense conflict and refugee flight from Syria. These discourses reflect stark assumptions in the public mind that the purpose of ‘borders’ is to constrain ‘mobility’ – and that failure to do so poses a risk to state cohesion and security. While the migration crisis is broadly viewed as both a practical and humanitarian problem, media discourses tended to focus on the points where the mobility of people is managed, controlled and restricted (including at border fences, sea ports, deportation centres) as a means of illustrating ‘a crisis of sovereignty’ in the modern nation-state. In the UK, the June 2016 referendum to leave the EU could be interpreted as the manifestation of this same sense of sovereign impotence, exacerbated by concerns about the inability to take single-handed decisions on erecting borders; indeed, it was dubbed as a ‘by-election on immigration’ (ITV 2016; Travis 2016).

Borrowing McCall’s (2013, 2) words from a different context, public opinion on EU membership (and Brexit) was thus shaped by:

responses to features of ‘dark’ globalization – ‘global terrorism’ and illegal migration – and resulting discourses of threat and insecurity, which have turned the page in political, media and academic understandings of state borders.

‘Borders’, in such rhetoric, are lines of defence and distinction between what ‘belongs’ and what is ‘foreign’. The fact that such discourses rely on a clear sense of ‘the other’ and the ‘external threat’ is evident in the ways in which British discourses about hardening borders were, up until recently, almost entirely blind to the existence of the UK’s land border with the Republic of Ireland, with whom it joined the then-EEC in 1973. Brexit – the process of the UK’s exit from the EU – was envisaged by Leave campaigners as an exercise in separation and selective treatment of different types of flows. The Brexit debate and problematique is thus quite clearly one not of EU per se but of national sovereignty. National sovereignty ‘presumes and justifies an alignment between territory, identity and political communities’: an alignment that literally comes together at the borders of the state (Kolossov and Scott 2013, 6). However, as any borders scholar will point out: it is not that simple. The greater the flow of goods and trade in services, the greater the need for people to be mobile too.

Multiperspectival Analyses of Borders

State borders are, fundamentally, traversable frontiers – even the most inaccessible and autocratic countries allow for some entry/exit. Rather than in their overall ‘impenetrability’, the power of a state’s borders can be best seen in the enforcement of differential treatment within the jurisdiction of the state. As such, borders should be conceptualized as ‘practices … situated and constituted in the specificity of political negotiations as well as in the everyday life performance of them’ (Andersen and Sandberg 2012, 6). Such approaches elucidate borders, and European borders in particular, as ‘not a static, geographical phenomenon, but [a] dynamic [one], consisting of political power, technological practices and knowledge-production’ (Lemberg-Pedersen 2012, 36). Understanding the UK–Ireland border as both an edge and a fissure in such a dynamic and multilayered process presents a fascinating case study because it demonstrates the entanglements and contradictions in the ways in which different groups are treated within these islands of Britain and Ireland.

In this article, we build upon Rumford’s (2012) ‘multiperspectival’ approach to understanding borders. Such an approach effectively espouses both the ‘practice’ and ‘mobility’ turns in border studies. Its main propositions centre on the idea that borders are produced and ‘performed’ through a multiplicity of border practices and ‘borderwork’ (Rumford 2006). Borders, in other words, ‘are not pregiven but [are] rather to be seen as effects of the practices through which they are made’ (Andersen and Sandberg 2012, 3). Second, Rumford claims that bordering processes happen at and away from borderlines, and are enacted through the work of political and social institutions (e.g. parliaments, central and local governments, civil society organizations), the bureaucratic practices associated with these, and the application of different legislation and policies (e.g. on citizens’ rights, immigration or trade) at various points within and without a state’s territory. Third comes the recognition that, to be effective, borders do not have to be either consensual, visible or constructed by state and political actors. Institutions outside the domain of formal political authority, as well as ordinary people, also construct borders through mundane social practices, forms of cultural representation, symbolism and emotion. As such, borders are mobile and diffused since they can be found ‘in every instance when/where a legal, political or socio-cultural regulation is applied to different types of flows² (Johnson et al. 2011, 64). Needless to say, however, the functions, the effectiveness and the effects of borders at these different levels of production will vary.

Much of this understanding of borders is encoded in the notion of ‘borderscapes’ (Dell’Agnese and Amilhat Szary 2015), which Brambilla (2015, 19) interprets as expressing:

the spatial and conceptual complexity of the border as a space that is not static but fluid and shifting; established and at the same time continuously traversed by a number of bodies, discourses, practices, and relationships that highlight endless definitions and shifts in definition between inside and outside, citizens and foreigners, hosts and guests across state, regional, raci...