Suchergebnisse

The UK's withdrawal from the European Union has enormous implications for Northern Ireland. All sides to the Brexit negotiations quickly agreed that it was vitally important to protect the peace process and to uphold the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement. However, the question of how this was to be done quickly became a point over which there were very apparent differences between the two sides; such differences are manifest within Northern Ireland in differing political views regarding European integration and national sovereignty. This paper explores the effects of EU membership on the peace process and the Agreement in light of the Brexit process. It provides an overview of the difficulties and frictions in finding a common approach from Northern Ireland to the European Union and explains how this is manifest in the response to the Brexit referendum of June 2016. It concludes by considering the ways in which the Agreement itself offers means of navigating some of the more thorny issues for Northern Ireland as a result of the UK's withdrawal from the EU.

In the space of just 20 years, internal cross-border co-operation (CBC) has transformed from a marginal issue for European integration into an important strand of the third objective of European Union's (EU's) regional policy. How might this process of transformation be explained? This study intends to reconstruct the chronology of its development through interviews and use of archival material. The emergence of the current CBC policy was not, we argue, an inevitable solution to the problem of border management but, rather, the result of a struggle between the actors of that policy sub-system. The dramatic rise of CBC is the result of a series of factors that originated with the signing of the Single European Act in 1986. The construction of CBC as a set of problems and solutions by a network of policy actors at the margins of the EU through a series of technical reports, together with the policy window opened by the appointment of the Delors Commission, allowed the launching of an innovative CBC policy which has consolidated over time.

AbstractBrexit has both increased the momentum towards Scottish independence and complicated what it could mean in practice, especially if Scotland rejoins the European Union (EU). EU accession would re-open the flow of goods, people, services and capital between Scotland and other EU member-states; a corollary of this, however, would be new restrictions on movement between Scotland and its non-EU neighbours. Effective border management entails a variety of 'at the border' and 'behind the border' processes. As much as these would require dedicated infrastructure and trained personnel, they would ultimately depend upon reliable data/information and good communication among myriad agencies, including on the other side of the border. Fundamentally, the nature and form of the border controls would be determined largely by the relationship that an independent Scotland had with the remainder of the UK—and, principally, on the relationship that the UK develops with the EU.

Next is the collective chapter by Hayward, Leary and Komarova on the the Irish border, an empirical topic that is of great importance and likely to reveal much for the future. It shows the challenges of managing the Irish border after Brexit, the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union centred on a campaign to 'take back control' of its borders. This objective was largely assumed to mean controls on the movement of people through British sea and airports. The movement of goods and services across the UK's 500km land border with the EU was given scant consideration. Two and a half years on, it has proven to be the most complicated challenge for the Brexit process - and one that creates an incredibly complex case for future border management. The border that partitions Northern Ireland from the rest of the island of Ireland has been contested since it was drawn (as a 'temporary measure') almost a century ago. Whilst unionists have seen it as a vital means of preserving British culture and rule in Northern Ireland, Irish nationalists detest it as a lingering manifestation of British colonialism. This is a result of two key processes that fundamentally changed the relationship between the UK and Ireland. First, the peace process built on the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement and, secondly, their common membership of the EU. In fact, the benefits of free movement of goods and services through the UK and Ireland's common membership of the EU's customs union and single market really couldn't be properly felt in the Irish border region until the peace process bore fruit. Apart from showing the big macro picture and the historical context in depth they also incorporate the micro community level with the Pettigo case study.