Launching “Global Britain” after the United Kingdom leaves the European Union has always been part of the Brexiteers’ dream. Thus some heads were turned when the Irish government presented the “Global Ireland 2025” initiative in the middle of 2018, at a time when Brexit negotiations in Brussels where going through yet another nervy patch. Dublin wants to “double the scope and impact of Ireland’s global footprint.” The twist is, it is doing so from within the EU.

The initiative includes setting up new embassies and revamping existing missions in the “Ireland House” format, which brings trade promotion agencies and Government officials under one roof. A commensurately large recruitment process for diplomats is nearing completion. Public outreach efforts have included a documentary painting the Irish diplomat as the “thin green line” protecting Irish interests abroad. Schoolchildren are regularly invited into Iveagh House, the seat of the diplomatic service. Officials are lobbying strongly in support of Ireland’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2020.

Of course, Brexit provides the background to this move, which Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar has told parliamentarians could cost €300 million by 2027. Throughout the torturous negotiations, Irish officials have worked feverishly to prevent a hard border on the island and protect the Good Friday Agreement. Bilateral institutions set up under the 1998 treaty have once again found themselves on the front pages as old channels of communication between Dublin and London are dusted off. For any Irish Government, a hard border represents a legacy-defining failure. The UK’s departure from the EU represents the crystallization of Irish fears about a backlash against an international order that has benefited the country in many ways.

Ireland’s trade ambitions

This is not really about finding new international partners after being abandoned by Mother Britannia, though. Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has clearly distinguished between Brexit and his department’s expansion. In early January, he warned, “while cognizant of the immense challenges our country faces with Brexit, it is critical that we plan for our future.” This hints that the underlying motive behind the “most ambitious renewal and expansion of Ireland’s international presence ever” is to future-proof Ireland’s ability to protect its interests.

The economic imperative to diversify Ireland’s trade makeup thus represents an equally important factor. Ireland’s existing trade partners are turning inwards, as new markets open themselves to outside competition.

In the United States–the destination for just over 25 percent of Irish exports–President Donald Trump is urging his citizens to turn away from foreign-made goods and services. The specter of a US-EU trade war looms, a conflict in which Irish business would suffer deeply. And the UK’s trading relationship with the EU—if it is to be formalized at all—remains to be determined. Uncertainty is rife.

On one hand, then, Irish exporters are facing reduced access to existing markets. On the other, the EU continues to prize open new markets with trade deals. Global Ireland seeks to take advantage of a trend noted in a 2015 policy review, which remarked that “an expanding global economy offers opportunities for exports [and] increased competition.” The Taoiseach has noted a desire to build stronger ties across Asia in response to a southward and eastward shift in “global economic and political power.”

The EU-Japan free trade deal, which came into effect last week, has warranted the biggest-ever capital investment in a new building in Tokyo. It is telling that the new Irish representation in Tokyo will house not just the embassy, but the gamut of state agencies: where goes Irish business, so goes the Irish Government. There is also a desire to take advantage of the MERCOSUR-EU trade deal that is in the works; thus the new missions in Santiago and Bogotá.

Underpinning this is a desire to protect the liberal international order, particularly with Brexit having demonstrated the value of international institutions to a small state. One commentator has derided the UNSC campaign as an “exercise in vanity”. From a strategic perspective, however, such a view disregards the utility of such organizations in today’s world, where international organizations amplify the voices of weak actors and restrain would-be hegemons. Amid the possible fraying of the US’ once-ironclad security guarantee in Europe and a global backlash against free trade, Dublin is taking a proactive stance in defense of multilateralism and its accoutrements.

In Support of the International Order

In this context, Global Ireland has two aims: to counteract the disintegration of international order and to shore up the state’s capacity to deal with similar challenges in future. Irish engagement with the New Hanseatic League provides an example of the first: Dublin has enthusiastically embraced the grouping of fiscally-conservative Northern EU states who have banded together after the loss of London’s restraining influence on Brussels.

The second goal–to improve the state’s reactive capability–is pursued through the re-organization of its apparatus: more missions will follow the “Ireland House” format, enabling closer cooperation between agencies and departments. The ECFR’s coalition calculator shows a disconcertingly isolated Ireland in a post-Brexit EU. By reinforcing embassies in Berlin and Paris with mid- and senior-level diplomatic talent, Dublin hopes to improve bilateral links with domestic powerbrokers, improving communication channels during crises.

The biggest risk facing Global Ireland is that political pressure will lead to its truncation. The Government may face pressure to lower spending on it in a worst-case Brexit scenario, which is now projected to lower Irish GDP by 4.25 percent by 2023. Assuming this pitfall is avoided, what would success for Global Ireland look like? Irish businesses continue to expand across the globe through 2025. A successful term on the UN Security Council sees Dublin emphasize openness and condemn intolerance across the globe. The island’s border remains peaceful and open as today. A fractious EU becalms itself and the storm of populism subsides.

As a small state, Ireland can hardly ever ensure these outcomes alone. But Global Ireland 2025 will maximize the country’s impact.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

If Brexit means Brexit, as we have heard from London for nearly two years, then a hard Brexit means a hard Brexit. And, by extension, a hard Brexit means a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which has been part of the United Kingdom since Irish partition in 1921.

This could mean political and economic disaster for the Republic, which will remain part of the 27-member European Union after the UK’s departure in March. Dublin has flagged the closely interlinked all-Ireland economy, and the North’s fragile peace process, to secure a guarantee—a so-called backstop—that would keep Northern Ireland in closer alignment with the EU than the rest of the UK, unless some other solution is found to keep the border open.

So much for the political aspiration. But what of the reality? Brexiteers determined to cut loose cleanly from the EU and the European customs union insist that trade can continue to flow, and borders will be invisible. Ask for clarification, though, and things get hazy.

(Not so in Spike Milligan’s satirical novel Puckoon, written in 1963 but set four decades previously. With startling prescience of today’s Brexit stand-off, his novel pokes fun at how clueless officials send the border through an Irish village. Because a tiny corner of the pub is now in Northern Ireland, locals gather there to drink because the beer is cheaper. When a local man dies in bed, his body is dragged to a local photographer: he’ll need snaps for a passport if the coffin is to pass from the church, on one side of the border, to the grave waiting on the other side.)

The post-Brexit hard border farce in London has been no surprise to anyone on the divided Irish island. Before the referendum, border concerns got more of an airing in the German newspapers than the British broadsheets. That blind spot confirmed a long-held Irish suspicion that Westminster has never really understood, nor cared about, the tragedy of the Northern Ireland troubles: nearly 3,500 people killed over 30 years.

That Irish resentment spikes further when Brexiteers claim that hard border fears have been thrown down as an artificial roadblock to a clean British getaway. That ignores—through ignorance or apathy—the very real concern that Brexit uncertainties could cause a serious slide in Northern Ireland’s economy, potentially driving young men without jobs or prospects into the arms of waiting splinter terror organizations.

The End of Magical Thinking

Hardliner Brexiteers insist the present, seamless management of the border for things like sales tax, excise, and security can be extended after Brexit. But this regime, developed through EU membership, will come to an end as Britain’s membership does. And even in the case of a new EU-UK free trade agreement, some kind of border controls will still be required to avoid smuggling.

No problem, say the Brexiteers: technology can prevent border queues. With hopes fading for a soft, Scandinavian solution, like that between Sweden and Norway, a less appetizing reality arises on the horizon: the hardest of borders, like that between Poland and Ukraine.

Poland is in the EU, the Ukraine is not—nor is it in the customs union or the EEA free-travel club of which Norway and Switzerland are members. And the border crossing at Dorohusk, 2000 kilometers east of London, is where Brexit magical thinking goes to die.

They use every kind of technology imaginable here to speed up the flow of cargo traffic: e-manifestos; in-road weighing scales; license-plate-reading cameras; automatic cross-checks with Europol databases; even stowaway scanners that can detect both carbon dioxide and heartbeats inside a sealed truck.

And yet, because the border is still hard, cargo-carrying trucks face a 24 hour wait to cross, while new EU security rules means all private cars are now stopped too.
All the technology you can buy, and infrastructure covering 12 hectares or almost 17 soccer pitches, cannot prevent the EU’s hard eastern border from being a depressing bottleneck.

Dorohusk is a memory of how things once were in Europe, and how things could be again if Britain crashes out of the EU and the backstop arrangement falls apart.
A hard border, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is a border that is “strongly controlled and protected … rather than one where people are allowed to pass through easily with few controls”.

No-deal Brexit means no-deal borders of the hard kind: in Northern Ireland, at Dover, and all other key trading points. With clogged ports and hard-border approach roads, Britain’s new chapter as a free-trading colossus may be over before it even begins.

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© REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

Watching EU leaders shuffle uncertainly around the Mirabell gardens in Salzburg, cameras clicking and whirring from the sidelines, I thought of when the pretty park—and indeed most of the city—attracted attention in 1964. The cast and crew took up residence to film “The Sound of Music,” a Hollywood musical about a singing family, a sinister duchess, and a young post boy who—spoiler alert—joins the Hitler Youth.

If they ever make a musical out of Brexit, it’s unlikely that, in the words of one Sound of Music tune, Salzburg will count among EU leaders’ favorite things.

With Brexit looming large, leaders’ hopes were again raised by the British spin machine that London might have something to move talks beyond the departure lounge. But hopes of entering a new space, to discuss a future relationship between Britain and the European Union, were once again dashed.

British Prime Minister Theresa May had everyone’s attention at dinner on Wednesday evening. With half a year to go until a disorderly departure from the EU, would May move? And would the EU shift in return, as senior officials had signaled before the meeting? No and no.

In the words of one dinner attendee, May “effectively read out an op-ed” she had written for that morning’s Die Welt newspaper. “To come to a successful conclusion, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to do the same,” she wrote, and said.

Everyone besides Britain views the UK’s position as wanting to have its cake and eat it. But they are waiting for London to put forward proposals that would make such cake-eating politically or legally possible for the EU27. Thus, the response of Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, to May’s after-dinner address was short and blunt: “It won’t work.”

Squaring the Circle

Talks on what happens after March 29 next year are stalled because London has yet to square the circle on the border that divides the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In six months’ time this will be an outer EU border and all such borders—particularly those which are also a customs border, as Britain wants—require checks and infrastructure.

This is unacceptable to Dublin and many in Northern Ireland who thought borders belonged in the bad old days of the province. The old border infrastructure from the Troubles was dismantled, never to return, after the 1998 peace agreement. Last December Britain agreed that Brexit must reflect and respect this when the UK departs the EU and the customs union.

Brussels put forward its proposal for turning this political aspiration into legal reality: minimize controls on the island of Ireland by keeping the province inside the EU customs union. Any checks on people or goods entering and leaving could then take place between Ireland and Great Britain, with a new border effectively in the Irish Sea.

But London views this as unacceptable: it would create different legal regimes within the UK—and Belfast politicians loyal to the crown fear this would separate them from the mainland. Their reservations carry weight because May depends on their parliamentary support in Westminster.

But if the EU’s legal proposal is unacceptable, what is the UK’s alternative? Salzburg could have been the moment when the prime minister presented even an outline. But she didn’t.

For the Irish, Brexit is not a technicality but, in the words of foreign minister Simon Coveney this week, a “lose-lose-lose situation.” The best Dublin hopes for on Brexit is a damage-limitation deal. Open borders in Ireland will keep people and trade moving. But Irish trucks having to exit and re-enter the EU on their way to mainland Europe could be disastrous—in particular for fresh food exporters.

For Dublin, the so-called Brexit backstop—no border on the island of Ireland—is as non-negotiable in Brexit talks as the 1998 peace agreement, the result of years of complicated talks backed by Dublin, London, but also Brussels. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said that all EU leaders he had spoken to gave him their “absolute support in standing behind Ireland,”and that the only acceptable EU agreement on Brexit was one that worked for Ireland. “I am leaving here very reassured,” he said.

With the clock running down to “finalize and formalize” a still non-existent Brexit deal, EU leaders will come together again next month for a moment of truth meeting—and possibly for an emergency meeting in November, in case more truth is needed.

All or Nothing

Will the EU27 hold together in the weeks ahead? Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán suggested in Salzburg that a group of EU leaders were seeking to “punish” the UK.  But in their closed-door talks, EU officials said, Orbán had nothing to say, not even when officials from Poland, a close ally of the Hungarian leader, proposed greater flexibility in the mandate for EU Brexit negotiators.

After a “frank bilateral” with Tusk, the British prime minister left Salzburg. The remaining EU27 leaders stayed to discuss the political declaration on their future relationship with the UK. That is supposed to accompany the legally binding Withdrawal Agreement but is also suspended in limbo.

Again, leaders reiterated that existing British proposals could not provide the basis of such a relationship. May has proposed a free trade agreement between her country and the EU, but wants to exclude services. EU leaders, with thinning patience, insist the internal market is not a cherry-picking farm: it’s all or nothing.

For what felt like the 1000^th time since the 2016 Brexit vote, Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “We were all unified today that there can be no compromises on the internal market.” French president Emmanuel Macron describes such thinking as “unacceptable” and called on his EU colleagues to increase pressure on London in the coming weeks. Echoing growing voices in Britain, Maltese leader Joseph Muscat called for a second referendum in the UK—but other EU leaders declined to follow suit.

The EU circus left Salzburg with leaders calling for compromise with London. Even the Irish—who have the most to lose—said they were open to creative thinking on “language and detail” of any agreement. But this is difficult, they say, given the British have presented nothing to work on.

“De-Dramatizing”

The lack of progress on Brexit couldn’t hide a significant shift on the EU’s other major headache: a long-term political answer to the emotive migration question.

Tusk said there was a “sharp determination” to expand the EU’s border and coast guard Frontex. He said most EU leaders want to press on with plans to create a standing corps of 10,000 border guards—amid some concerns over national sovereignty.

After the pre-summer drama on migration, pushed by German domestic politics, EU leaders transferred their hopes of “de-dramatizing” Brexit onto the refugee question.

Since 2015, EU member states have been divided on whether they should be obliged to share the continent’s refugee burden. In a bid to end the deadlock, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proposed a new push for “flexibility solidarity.” Describing it as “a proposal I don’t even like myself,” he suggested countries that refuse to accept asylum seekers, such as those in central Europe, should be obliged to contribute on other—chiefly financial—fronts.

President Macron warned in his post-summit press conference that countries that refuse to contribute more to Schengen or other solidarity measures will be edged out of the common travel area. “Countries that don’t want more Europe will no longer touch structural funds,” he said.

Meanwhile EU leaders have pressed on with plans to push offshore the refugee issue, returning people rescued at sea to Egypt and other non-EU countries.

With the migration issue flaring up again in Germany before state elections in the fall, Chancellor Merkel is happy not to push for big changes at the EU level. Above all the German leader knows that, after leading the moral charge on refugees three years ago, such a migration compromise now is less music to her ears than the sound of a political climb-down.

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