Chris

The IRA wants a United ireland, not a hard border. The peace process was sold to republicans on the basis that in the long run, an invisible frontier, normalisation of all-Ireland institutions and a constitutional mechanism for an eventual border poll was a better prospect than a shooting war, especially after the supply line from Col. Gadaffi and the cash from Noraid began to dry up. It is no coincidence that the IRA began serious efforts at decommissioning within months of the Twin Towers spelling out to ‘Irish’ New Yorkers what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of an act of terrorism.

The EU wants a United Europe, not a hard border, in Ireland or anywhere else. That is its reason to exist and it is incapable of conceiving of any other ending. Philosophically I think the EU’s bureaucracy still doesn’t comprehend Brexit and given the continuing and very obvious division in British public life on the issue, feels quite justified in pursuing a negotiating strategy that aims to keep the U.K. as tightly aligned to the bloc as possible. The U.K. is not Norway; sitting right on the EU’s doorstep is one of the world’s biggest economies, and one of the world’s financial centres, and one of the world’s few true global cities. The risk to the EU project in the event that the U.K. seriously diverges from its regulatory regime could be destabilising. The prospect of keeping the U.K. tightly aligned is too tempting, both to prevent competitive deregulation and also to ensure the U.K. re-joining at some point is a realistic prospect, and an argument that could be made seriously in a future referendum.

As far as the EU is concerned, this is not about destabilising the U.K. or creating a border. It’s about fighting as hard as possible to avoid a border and to keep the U.K. as close to the EU as possible. The impasse occurs because it is pretty clear within the U.K. that amongst Brexit supporters, the sentiment that the U.K. should make a clean and decisive break from the EU is so strong that to ignore it is politically destabilising. Thus the U.K. and the EU side both have irreconcilable differences, and neither side has thus far budged. It is reasonable for the EU to suspect Boris will eventually cave in, because that’s what Teresa May did. Boris’ strategy for trying to prove that he won’t cave in (that highly contentious piece of legislation) is high risk, but it is meant to create a lot of noise, as it has in fact done.