ABSTRACT
Introduction On 22 January 1972, Taoiseach Jack Lynch and Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Patrick Hillery signed Ireland’s Treaty of Accession to the then European Communities in Brussels.1 This was a momentous day for Ireland and its people as it marked the end of a journey towards inclusion in this continental European club that began in the early 1960s when Ireland submitted its first membership application. Membership was stalled because of wider European politics, especially President De Gaulle’s efforts to delay UK accession. Ireland was the first relatively underdeveloped state to join this prosperous group of West European states. Economic and regional divergences were present among existing members but Ireland alone was significantly poorer than the others. Membership was infused with geo-political significance because Ireland became a member state together with the UK, its former colonial master. It was also a momentous day for the EU as it signified a first enlargement that led over time to a Union, continental in scale, of 28 states. The signing ceremony was replete with the pomp and circumstance of interstate diplomacy and treaty making. For the Irish team, led by Foreign Minister Hillery, the formal ceremony was the end of a complex set of formal negotiations between Ireland and the Union that began in June 1970. For the Irish people it was confirmation of the decision they had taken to endorse membership by an overwhelming majority (83 per cent) in May 1972. Ireland’s choice for Europe was voluntary and decisively backed by the Irish people. On 1 January 1973 a new phase of Ireland’s political history began. A relatively young nation state opted to exchange formal political sovereignty for a ‘pooling of sovereignty’ and interdependence with Europe. The Irish state emerged in 1922 from a powerful state-seeking nationalism that had persistently mobilised to end centuries of British rule in Ireland. Although successful in its
state-seeking endeavour, Irish nationalism was only partially fruitful because the state that emerged in 1922 represented only 26 of the 32 counties on the island of Ireland. This was not atypical of the experience of new self-governing territories that were frequently accompanied in Europe by disputed borders. The presence of a contested border complicated the relationship between state and nation and ensured that territorial politics retained a hard edge which was underlined by the re-emergence of communal conflict in Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s, just as Ireland and the UK were about to join the EU. Northern Ireland joined the EU as part of the accession process of the UK at a very turbulent time in its history. The citizens of Northern Ireland did not vote in a referendum to join and the UK had just introduced direct rule from London. In an environment of high communal tension, and in the absence of a referendum, EU membership was not a salient issue. Although both parts of the island of Ireland joined on the same day, there was a fundamentally different relationship with the EU north and south of the Irish border. For the citizens of the Republic, it was their settled will to join, an act of sovereignty, whereas for the citizens of Northern Ireland it was a by-product of their constitutional position within the UK. Ireland and the UK’s joint membership of the EU in 1973 altered the context and environment of British-Irish relations and relations between North and South. Its most important impact was to offer Ireland a way of diluting its excessive economic dependence on the UK and mediating the asymmetry of the bilateral relationship between a large and small state. Although the return of violence to Northern Ireland coincided with membership of the Union, both states ensured that tension and conflict about Northern Ireland did not spill over into their relationship in the Union. Prior to membership it was argued by some that joint membership of the Union would dilute the salience of the border and that it would wither over time, a view that proved wildly optimistic. That said, the impact of EU membership on the situation in Northern Ireland and on BritishIrish relations influenced the conflict and the search for peace in a number of ways, many of which centred on the changing definition of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ that EU membership facilitated (Hayward 2006). The aim of this chapter is to analyse the impact of EU membership over 40 years ago on state and nation in Ireland. This is challenging because the relationship between state and nation is highly contingent and complex. In addition the Union is a distinctive polity – not a traditional nation state but a form of political order that has traces of both state and nation. Moreover, the EU has not been a static polity but has concluded five major treaty changes, transformative economic programmes, and the addition of 19 new member states since its inception. Change in the EU was driven not only by functional pressures and policy problems but also by the commitment to ‘ever closer union’ contained in the treaties. Thus, European integration is both process and project and there are powerful political and economic forces that favour and promote further integration among the member states and their regions. The academic literature on European integration is characterised by major disputes concerning the nature of the EU and its impact on state and nation. This is not surprising because the
Union defies simple categorisation and is highly novel and experimental (Laffan et al. 1999). One view is that ‘as a process, European integration has a transformative impact on the European state system and its constituent units’ (Christiansen et al. 1999, 529). Another is that notwithstanding over 60 years of formal European integration, ‘the effects of European integration on identities and public spheres appear to be weak’ (Schimmelfennig 2012, 42) and that ‘national ideas and identities are deeply entrenched and resistant to change’ (Wallace et al. 2015, 23). What is clear is that the process of European integration is neither linear nor inexorable. It is subject to the push and pull of domestic and international politics and political economy, goes in multiple directions and is characterised by waves of contestation and tension. Its impact on the domestic is stronger in some dimensions than others and the specificity of each member state matters: size, history, level of prosperity and geographical location. Although neighbouring islands, historical experience has meant that Ireland and the UK had different motivations for joining the EU and different expectations of what membership meant. The cross-over between the two states is of course found in Northern Ireland, a devolved region within the UK but a contested territory given the commitment of nationalists within Northern Ireland to Irish unity and the manner in which a United Ireland was part of the official nationalism of the Irish state. Moreover, Northern Ireland had to fight for a voice on European issues within the UK and the Dublin Government occasionally used its seat at the table to address issues of significance to Northern Ireland (Murphy 2014, 117-118). To date, the EU has not transcended the nation states by absorbing them into a United States of Europe, a state possessing formal sovereignty in the classical Weberian model. Rather it has transformed the exercise of sovereignty in Europe and altered the relationship between territory, statehood, identity and the locus of decision making on public policies. The nation state has been transformed into a member state and neighbours into partners. The transformation was neither smooth nor complete. According to Giddens, the EU ‘has become experienced as a community of fate in ways it was never before’ during the Eurozone crisis (Giddens 2013). The crisis may well have underlined the depth of interdependence among the Eurozone state but it did so in ways that brought home to peoples and governments that they shared a deep mutual vulnerability; this vulnerability was not welcomed by the citizens of the Eurozone. The crisis stirred up tensions, conflict and a return to national stereotypes evident in the portrayal of a German Chancellor in a Nazi uniform and the Greeks as lazy and feckless. Migration and intra-EU mobility has also led to negative reactions from a segment of every European society as they experience the dilution of national political community and exclusive identities. The Irish state, the wider island of Ireland and Irish society is bound up with these major shifts in twenty-first century European and global politics. The objective of this chapter is to explore the interaction between EU membership and the Irish state and nation both north and south of the border. Ireland joined the EU as a relatively young state with a long history of nationalist mobilisation and a society with a strong sense of national identity. Yet as analysed
below, this young state embraced EU membership and its people are broadly in favour of integration and the perceived benefits of club membership. This is in stark contrast to another relatively young European state: Norway has twice signed accession treaties with the Union but did not join when its people rejected membership in two popular referendums. The experience of Northern Ireland within the EU also differs because of its status as a region with a devolved government of its own within a pluri-national state. Public opinion on membership also differed. In 1975, following a re-negotiation of membership terms, the UK held a referendum on the outcome of the re-negotiation. The vote in Northern Ireland was 52 per cent ‘yes’ which was significantly lower than the UK result of 67 per cent ‘yes’ and way below the overwhelming endorsement of membership in the 1972 Irish referendum at 83 per cent (Moxon-Browne 1983, 157). The analysis in this chapter is developed in three sections. Section one explores the question of the EU and statehood. Section two switches to identity politics and the question of the EU and the nation. Section three considers the role that the EU has played in times of ‘crisis’ for state and nation on the island of Ireland, specifically in relation to Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger economic crisis from late 2008 and the crisis of the Troubles. In relation to the last point, the co-evolution of membership and communal conflict within Northern Ireland brought nationalism, sovereignty and borders sharply into focus in a way that could no longer be considered an internal UK matter.
