‘It’s not just the economy, stupid !’ Brexit, the Good Friday Agreement and the Irish border conundrum

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that to find a solution to the Irish border issue resulting from Brexit, one has to go further than simply looking at the commercial, social and economic threats Brexit poses in Northern Ireland and in cross-border relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The current Irish Border problem is fundamentally political and constitutional rather than socio-economic. Yet, as a political and constitutional question, the ongoing Irish Border problem is not just a consequence of Brexit. It is first and foremost the result of the unfinished nature of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA). In the two decades that have passed since the Agreement, no real solution has been found to the Irish Border question, which had been the crux of the conflict between Irish nationalism and unionism since the very creation of Northern Ireland in 1920. Hence, if the prospect of Brexit, soft or hard, raises such a complex Irish Border problem, it is not simply because of its economic and commercial impacts : it is also due to the political and constitutional weaknesses of the GFA itself. One of the major weaknesses lies in the consociational institutions established in Northern Ireland in 1998, which, instead of building cross-community confidence and consensus, have embedded and reinforced sectarian polarisation in Northern Ireland. The second weakness lies in the incomplete constitutional definition of the roles of Dublin and London as neutral co-sovereign guarantor states of the GFA.