The European Union and the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Giada Lagana

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030591168
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030591175
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia europea

This book examines the economic and political contributions of the EU to the Northern Ireland peace process, tracing the genesis of EU involvement since 1979 and analysing how it acted as an arena in which to foster dialogue and positive cooperation. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive elite interviews this volume provides the first comprehensive study of how the EU contributed to the reconfiguration of Northern Ireland from a site of conflict to a site of conflict amelioration and peace-building. The book demonstrates that the relationship between Northern Ireland and the EU has been much more significant in the peace process than previously suggested.

© The Author(s) 2021

G. LaganaThe European Union and the Northern Ireland Peace ProcessPalgrave Studies in European Union Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59117-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Giada Lagana¹

(1)

Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Giada Lagana

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1 The European Union and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland

On 31 August 1994, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) announced a ceasefire. On 13 October of the same year, the Combined Loyalist Military Command, representing the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and Red Hand Commandos announced a loyalist paramilitary ceasefire. Twenty-five years of violence, endless killings, destruction, and intimidation had ended, at least temporarily. This long cycle of violence had robbed an entire generation of its right to live in peace on the island of Ireland. In 1998, the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA), and subsequent accords,¹ provided governing arrangements acceptable to almost all of the major parties ending the violent conflict in Northern Ireland. The Agreement involved a careful and standardised political accommodation between the main political groups on one side, and the United Kingdom (UK) and Irish governments on the other. The main objective was to provide constitutional mechanisms that allowed nationalists a potential means of fulfilling their aspiration for Irish reunification. This was to be balanced against the recognition that change could only come about with the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland to satisfy the unionist majority who sought to maintain Northern Ireland’s status within the UK. Moreover, the Agreement provided a cross-border dimension that was meant to satisfy nationalists’ goal of policy coordination in Ireland if there was to be no immediate reunification.

Scholars (Tannam 1999; Laffan 2005; Hayward 2006; Todd 2011; McCall 2014; Murphy 2014) have argued that the British–Irish improved relations helped to deliver a North/South institutional architecture that reflected the cross-border cooperation thrust of European Integration and prefigured an era of peace and cross-border cooperation focused on the island of Ireland. The impetus for the creation of linkages across the Irish border came from the promise to open the territorial cage of the state to enable the development of intercultural dialogue and inter-communal relations (McCall 2014, pp. 40–42). European Union (EU)² funds and initiatives played both an economic and a political role in providing the first backdrop and context for challenging the ‘zero-sum’ logic of the Northern Ireland conflict. With this, cross-border cooperation, economic regeneration, and reconciliation were essential components of an EU peacebuilding effort on the island.

The existing literature has shed light on controversial and somewhat marginally known issues related to the EU’s influence on the peace process. However, monographic studies of the historical evolution of the EU’s role in Northern Ireland are still sparse (Tannam 1999; McCall 1999; Murphy 2014; Murphy 2018). Authors have provided analyses of the EU’s policies implemented with a conflict transformation objective³ and discussed numerous problems in terms of policy coherence, institutional coordination, implementation, and normative acceptability.

This book raises many similar questions but approaches them from a more detailed historical and theoretical analysis than hitherto available. It investigates how the EU contributed to the transformation of Northern Ireland from a site of conflict to a site of peacebuilding and conflict amelioration during the formative period between 1981 and 2007. The year 1981 marked the first period in which the then European Community (EC) held substantial debates regarding the Northern Ireland conflict. The year 2007 constitutes the culmination of the EU attempt to consolidate peace by facilitating regional-level empowerment. In 2007, the European Commission established the Northern Ireland Task Force with the objective of providing a solid basis for the conduct of EU-Northern Ireland and the border region relations. An in-depth investigation of this period provides us with important insights into patterns and legacies of EU peacebuilding strategies which continue up until the present day. Furthermore, an examination of these years reveals the shaping of future relationships between not only Northern Ireland and the EU but also between the UK and Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the UK, and the island of Ireland and the EU.

This investigation matters because the 23 June 2016 referendum on the UK’s continuing membership of the EU was a watershed moment in the history of Northern Ireland. It marked a turning point in the history of relations between the region and the EU. Most importantly, Brexit brought the topic to the centre of current political and scholarly debates with academics questioning the profound implications that the UK’s decision to leave the EU could have for Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland as a whole. Scholars (Hayward 2018; Tannam 2018; Murphy 2018) argues that while the ultimate impact will depend on the shape and detail of any new relationship negotiated between the UK and the EU, Brexit can affect nearly all aspects of North-South and British-Irish relations. If some changes appear relatively minor, others raise serious political difficulties for Northern Ireland. Brexit also highlighted a series of unanswered questions: How will the UK withdrawal from the EU disrupt Northern Ireland’s political and economic situation? If the EU has been essential to building peace in Northern Ireland, how will Brexit affect the peace process? This book covers the breadth of the EU’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process, ranging from cross-border cooperation, economic and industrial regeneration, and peace and reconciliation, whereas existing contributions predominantly cover only one of those dimensions.

From a more abstract perspective, the EU’s influence on the peace process in Northern Ireland serves as an instructive case with regard to general patterns of international and EU peacebuilding. In recent years, the EU has expanded its role in preventing conflicts and building peace, but its institutional practices remain insufficiently conceptualised. An analysis of EU peacebuilding work has placed EU practices almost entirely within traditional instruments of security governance, such as conflict prevention and mediation, crisis management, post-conflict stabilisation, human rights, human security, and civilian protection (Gëzim and Doyle 2018; Bergmann and Niemann 2018). This is largely because scholars (Tocci 2007; Richmond 2016) have argued that the EU’s peacebuilding framework does not yet represent a coherent intellectual project, relying instead on existing liberal peacebuilding approaches affiliated with restoring security, strengthening the rule of law, supporting democratic processes, delivering humanitarian assistance, and supporting economic recovery. This book, however, offers an illustrative example of how the EU’s peace support operations should not only be studied through the lens of liberal peacebuilding but instead should be seen as self-mirroring the internal institutional dynamics of the community, in parallel with the hierarchical governance integration and consolidation of politics within the member states.

The effectiveness of the wide range of instruments and resources the EU deploys in preventing conflict and promoting sustainable peace beyond is notoriously difficult to measure. How societies evolve and how and whether EU initiatives develop from knowledge and relationship-building to produce tangible results depends not only on EU policies but on the expectations and desires of local populations. The case of Northern Ireland becomes instructive for other regions of conflict around the world because it shows how positive policy and financial outcomes, deriving from the interactions between the European Commission and local actors and administrations, are highly dependent upon the willingness at a local level to engage with the EU. Second, it shows that the challenge of consolidating peace is, quoting President Barroso himself, a marathon, not a sprint. Peacebuilding is a task most suitable for the nature of the EU’s ‘soft’ power as it seeks to enable, fund, empower, and reform in the long term (Hayward and Murphy 2012). The most important element for sustaining all of these trends, and crucial to their success, remains the EU’s enduring commitment to the task.

With these research interests in mind, this introductory chapter illustrates why the existing literature on the EU’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped. Many analyses are hampered by contentious assumptions about the nature of the EU’s influence or the EU’s legitimate political role in conflict amelioration and peacebuilding. Moreover, there is a lack of a framework through which to analyse systematically new policy processes, the state authority, and the multitude of actors involved. A corresponding theoretical framework that sets out government, governance, and policy networks acting in the shadow of a hierarchy, will be subsequently developed.

2 The Debate on the EU’s Role in the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Overall, one cannot identify a well-developed theoretical and historical debate on the EU’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process. Numerous valuable attempts (Teague 1996; Laffan and Payne 2001; Murphy 2014) have been made, which have used a number of different theories and explanatory factors to assert the influence of EU policies on conflict transformation and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. Hypotheses have been advanced to explain certain moments or characteristics of the EU’s involvement in the conflict, but theoretically consistent historical analyses of this complex policy process remain missing.

The debate may be summed up in three stylised positions. The first highlights the lack of interest within Northern Ireland regarding membership of the EU. The region was experiencing profound political instability during the early years of the UK and Irish accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973. Membership coincided with the introduction of direct rule from Westminster in Northern Ireland and the intensification of violence. As a consequence, the prospects of membership were only minimally discussed and the early years of being part of the then EEC were marked by low levels of interest and engagement. In the Stormont debating chambers there was some discussion of European matters prior to the UK accession but these were invariably coloured by domestic political considerations or channelled into more traditional arguments.

The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) was the only Northern Ireland political party to engage positively with the prospects of EEC membership from an early stage (McLoughlin 2009). This was partly because European membership offered the chance to place the conflict on an international platform. In contrast, the then-dominant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) largely ignored the new European context, making only scant reference to the EEC in their 1973 election manifesto (Murphy 2009, p. 594). This indifference was also apparent beyond party politics. Guelke (1988, p. 155) has concluded that ‘there was a relatively muted reaction in the province to actual entry to the Community’. These outlooks did not engender an open-minded disposition towards Europe, or its potential, because no settlement existed at the institutional level to allow any progress in this sense.

The second position mirrors critical interpretations of EU integration and focuses on the impacts of cross-border cooperation for conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The outbreak of communal conflict from 1968 onwards drew attention again to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Metagoverning Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland
• 3. The Genesis of the First European Union/Northern Ireland Peacebuilding Network
• 4. The 1984 Haagerup Report on the Situation in Northern Ireland
• 5. EU Structural Funds Programmes on the Island of Ireland: Interreg and the Cross-Border Dimension
• 6. The European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland
• 7. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement: Cross-Border Cooperation and Peacebuilding in the Context of the New Institutions
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter