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ABSTRACT
The UK’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) has revealed the ways in which the logic of European unity conflicts fundamentally with the very particular understandings of the UK Union at the heart of the political identity of Northern Ireland’s largest political party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This article maps the changes in the relationship between the DUP and the EU over time, charting the party’s developing approach to European integration as one defined first by confrontation, then increasing (although incomplete) apparent accommodation, and latterly to renewed hostility as Brexit became an issue of increasing and immediate consequence. By locating this study within the broader theoretical and comparative literature on nationalist/regionalist parties’ strategies towards the EU, we note that the DUP stands as an outlier relative to other small ethno-nationalist parties. We conclude that despite recent, apparently ‘liberalising’ trends (in part driven by involvement with EU institutions) DUP unionism, unlike the ideologies of regionalist parties in other parts of Europe, has remained stubbornly more ‘ethnic’ and exclusionary than integrationist or ‘civic’ in nature, and continues to rest ultimately on a narrow and particular conception of sovereignty which is perceived to be threatened by ‘ever closer Union’ at a European level.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Mary C. Murphy is a senior lecturer in politics and holds a Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration at University College Cork.
Jonathan Evershed is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork working on the ESRC project ‘Between Two Unions: The Constitutional Future of the Islands after Brexit’.
Notes
1 For more on the UUP, its rise and fall as the primary Unionist party in Northern Ireland, the development of ‘new Unionism’ in the 1990s, and the party’s contemporary struggle to (re)position itself vis-à-vis its Democratic Unionist rival (see Tonge, Branniff, Hennessey, McAuley, & Whiting, Citation2019).
2 At the time of writing, there is some speculation that the DUP may be prepared to accept a Northern Ireland-specific solution to the question of the Irish border, and some form of post-Brexit differentiation between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. If this does transpire to be the case, arguably it will be because the party has been forced into such a position by, inter alia, mounting pressure from business interests and Northern Ireland’s pro-Brexit majority in the face of deep economic uncertainty and concerns about a return to violence; and the loss of its power and authority in the context of an altered parliamentary arithmetic, rather than representing new or sustained thinking within the party about how to reconcile its unionist principles with the realities of Brexit.