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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.
Notes
1. These include the free movement of goods, services, capital and workers as part of the European Union’s acquis (enshrined in the 1957 Treaty of Rome). They are not to be confused with the more commonly known outside of Europe four fundamental freedoms (of speech, worship, and from want and fear) proposed by President F. D. Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address.
2. Example of people, goods, services, information or capital.
3. Here, the author discusses Perera’s (Citation2007) use of ‘borderscapes’.
4. For instance, former European Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potočnik has called for the ‘freedom of knowledge’ (dubbed by some ‘knowledge mobility’) to be achieved with the free movement of data. More recently, Estonia has made the case for the free movement of data in a ‘Vision Paper on the Free Movement of Data – the Fifth Freedom of the European Union’ (Citation2017).
5. Cited in Koeppen (Citation2015, 12).
6. As the Ministry of Justice (Citationn.d., 1) explains, ‘The Crown Dependencies are the Bailiwick of Jersey, the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Isle of Man… [They] are not part of the UK but are self-governing dependencies of the Crown. This means they have their own directly elected legislative assemblies, administrative, fiscal and legal systems and their own courts of law. The Crown Dependencies are not represented in the UK Parliament’.
7. The fact that the CTA was maintained at the same time as the Anglo-Irish Trade War shows how different types of flows can be treated very differently within a single border regime.
8. Established through the Treaty of Maastricht (1993) and interlinked with the completion of the European single market through the implementation of the Single European Act (1993).
9. Between 1921 and 1972, Northern Ireland was governed through a unionist-dominated local devolved parliament and government. The onset of ‘the troubles’ (1969) and an increasingly fragile political and security climate led to the suspension of local parliament in 1972 (and to its formal abolishment in 1973). Thus, for the first 25 years of UK’s and Ireland’s EEC/EU membership, Northern Ireland was governed through direct rule from Westminster. In 1998 the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement re-established devolution in Northern Ireland. Though the devolved institutions (parliament and government) in the region operated successfully and without interruption between 2007 and 2017, since then regional power sharing has collapsed as a result of a breakdown of relationships between the main political parties.
10. An intention which the UK Prime Minister Theresa May first announced in January 2017.
11. As confirmed by PM Theresa May in her speech in Parliament on 28th February Citation2018, broadcast by the BBC.
12. Especially since the UK Government has indicated that the country would not remain a member of the EEA.
13. Also, with respect to possible changes to how the CTA regulates the status of British and Irish citizens in each-others’ territories, de Mars et al. (Citation2017, 6) point out that since ‘[t]he main tenet of the CTA is that UK nationals in Ireland are treated as equivalent to Irish nationals in Ireland in almost all respects, and vice versa’, without changes to the CTA post-Brexit, UK citizens would be granted ‘EU-level rights… in an EU-member state’. The authors further suggest that ‘while the EU has no automatic competence over third country migration policy in the Member States who are not party to Schengen… there is no EU Member State that offers nationals from outside of the EU a better status in an EU Member State than EU nationals have’. This may be among the reasons why, by contrast to the recurrent (since the EU Referendum in 2016) news coverage of a surge in Irish passport applications by citizens living in Northern Ireland and Britain, there has been very little public discussion of potential migration of UK citizens to Ireland.
14. The ‘Joint report from the negotiators of the European Union and the United Kingdom Government on progress during phase 1 of negotiations under Article 50 TEU on the United Kingdom’s orderly withdrawal from the European Union’ (on 8th December Citation2017) states that ‘The UK and EU27 Member States can require persons concerned to apply to obtain a status conferring the rights of residence as provided for by the Withdrawal Agreement and be issued with a residence document attesting to the existence of that right’. In this regard, advocacy groups such as ‘the3million’ (Citation2018) have been extremely critical of the proposed by the UK Government ‘settled status’ (eligibility for which includes 5 years of lawful residence in the UK prior to the date of withdrawal), suggesting that it does not deal with issues such as the aggregation of pensions, healthcare or benefits from EU countries, provides no reciprocity with British citizens in Europe, proposes systematic criminality checks (illegal under EU law), and altogether represents a reduction of status, compared to the presently applying permanent residence.