Conclusion. The Evolution of Ireland’s Role in International Relations, Past and Present

It has been suggested that, in Ireland, ‘national sovereignty today has less the absolute and infeasible character claimed for it in the [1916] Proclamation and is more about, in [Robert] Emmet’s words, taking our place amongst the nations of the world’.¹ The original Sinn Féin policy called simply upon Ireland to assert its distinct existence on the world stage. By contrast, Dáil Eireann’s claim in 1919 that an independent Ireland should serve as a benefit and safeguard to Europe and America demonstrated a greater awareness that states in international relations do not exist in isolation. Therefore, they must both define and defend their interests accordingly. There was some truth to the claim of the First Dáil that Britain’s colossal First World War debts to the United States had altered greatly the international context in which Ireland operated, although the significance of this development did not become more apparent until 1932 when Britain defaulted on these debt payments at the same time as its Commonwealth uniformly imposed tariffs against the United States. America’s central role in shaping the international economic order in the wake of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 was both intended and effectively insured that such tactics could not be used against America again. While the US considered that ‘the most important relations of Americans to Ireland always have been informal, spontaneous and familial’,² Ireland was likely to respond to shifts in Anglo-American relations in its own way. During the 1930s, this was witnessed by the revival of post-1918 calls for Irish banking reform and for Ireland’s relations with Britain to be fundamentally reassessed. By the 1950s, America’s leadership of international financial markets had created a process of parallel evolution for Ireland and Europe. US involvement in European security allowed states to concentrate on undertaking programmes of economic development without a commensurate reliance on defence spending, while US support for European integration helped to enhance the diplomatic voice of small states, as was reflected by the maximising of a Belgian role in debates on European security and a Dutch role in debates on international law. The context of Ireland’s role in international relations, however, was not always as clearly defined, particularly prior to its entry into the EEC.

As was reflected by the collapse of the Fine Gaedhael initiative in 1922 and the Anglo-Irish financial settlement of 1926, the necessary imposition of London’s foreign trade priorities stemming from Irish membership of the British Commonwealth limited Irish options for development. British compendiums of significant speeches in twentieth-century international relations cited de Valera’s assertion that Ireland aspired to be ‘the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis for right living’ as the most significant Irish contribution,³ although so long as Ireland remained part of the commonwealth its voice was essentially muted. As late as 1960, Ireland was generally mentioned in international newsreels only when British media outlets chose to do so and then usually just to provide Ireland with a bad press.⁴ Nationally, a discrediting of Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin policy and an almost exaggerated acclaim during this period for T.K. Whitaker’s ‘trade-restrictive and capital-immobile’ ideas (which were abandoned on his retirement in 1976) was justified by economic commentators who argued that ‘independence had done nothing for Irish economic development’ while inexplicably not acknowledging that Ireland’s ongoing membership of the sterling area ever since 1922 still practically governed its diplomatic and trading choices and effectively constituted a lack of independence.⁵ Notwithstanding a brief interlude during the mid-1960s, it was not essentially until Ireland’s entry into the European Monetary System in 1978 that the country began to adapt strategically to changes in the international economic order. Therefore, Garret FitzGerald judged that, ‘however paradoxical it may at first sight appear, the ultimate justification for Irish independence will, I believe, eventually be seen to lie in Ireland’s accession in 1972 to the European Union’.⁶ Implicit in this perspective was the existence of a restrictive set of choices hitherto and a resulting unfulfilled potential, even if many commentators chose instead to focus on the idea that European social policy was serving to alter Ireland’s sense of national identity.

Many pre-independence Irish nationalist thinkers, as well as some later scholars on Ireland’s relations with Europe, tended to see a tradition of Christian humanism, reputedly disavowed by many British imperial journalists, as a potential bridge between Ireland and the European continent, perhaps particularly Belgium and the Netherlands.⁷ Indeed, in common with the Netherlands and future European republics with Christian-democratic governments, to guarantee freedom of will and conscience, there was purposively no state religion, nor a state church, within Éire/Ireland after 1937, as is the case within the United States but not within either the United Kingdom or the British Commonwealth. Be that as it may, interest in the European Christian-democratic tradition within Ireland would appear to have been relatively slight in the post-1945 period. Aside from the fact that the ecclesiastical capitals of Ireland were in Northern Ireland, an explanation for this development could be found in a contemporary Irish tendency to equate internationalism with a decline in the influence of religion on social policy.⁸ The European Christian-democratic tradition was focused less on social policy, however, than seeking to influence the formulation of international law and evolving theories of human rights.⁹ An Irish parallel with this process could be found in its own efforts to promote anti-belligerent attitudes in international relations, such as in its implicit or direct criticisms of the operations of a military-industrial complex and, in particular, the affect of an international arms trade on the Middle East and Africa. If a tradition existed of Irish diplomats making rather bald statements of Irish national identity on the international stage (a criticism sometimes levelled against de Valera, Sean MacBride and Frank Aiken as well as many other small-state actors at the UN), Ireland’s record in attempting to develop actual legislation relating to international disarmament and human rights has been a fairly consistent one, as well as a common bond between the avowedly Christian moral standpoint of early Irish diplomats and more recent Irish diplomatic activity, including the emergence of Irish legal figures like Mahon Hayes and Mary Robinson as leaders of UN commissions on human rights.¹⁰

Debates on international relations can witness the existence of conflicting undercurrents of opinion even among nominal allies. For instance, American distaste for the role of the London School of Economics (LSE) in schooling Marxist critics of US foreign policy throughout the developing world, a trend made particularly evident during the 1970s,¹¹ evidently influenced even the most Anglophile of American scholars, who suggested that the influence of the LSE in shaping discourse on international history may not have been an entirely positive one.¹² There was evidently an Irish parallel in this process,¹³ even if the primary feature of the critiques of the international order by Michael D. Higgins, Trócaire and others focused instead on the role of the international banking in shaping the operations of developmental aid. Indeed, if reactions to the ‘global partnership’ system launched in 1968 can serve as a useful barometer of states’ opinions, Ireland’s self-image in this regard would appear to have governed by two distinct beliefs: first, ‘in the case of small donors like Ireland, [self-interested strategic] power does not figure in its relations with developing countries’, and second, significant Irish contributions to non-governmental aid organisations have been the aspect of foreign policy in which the Irish public was ‘most personally and actively involved’.¹⁴ Indeed, the Irish army, which consistently made one of the highest contributions in Europe to UN peacekeeping,¹⁵ and Irish non-governmental organisations alike have taken up the cause of protesting about the lack of ‘specific humanitarian guidelines’ for all UN-sponsored developmental aid programmes to follow.¹⁶

As UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for launching a ‘Global Compact’ to promote a greater sense of corporate social responsibility among multinational companies in promoting ‘sustainable development goals’, but as it deals with little or no human factors (other than financial management) the idea would be criticised widely, with even leaders of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) suggesting that the only real difference between the WTO and the Global Compact programme was that the former was not pretending to be fulfilling a humanitarian function.¹⁷ As someone who worked closely with both Annan (in her capacity as a UN High Commissioner) and Ireland’s army and voluntary organisations, Mary Robinson found from experience that the most effective suggestions for dealing with humanitarian crises invariably came from amateur activists in various non-governmental organisations who, unlike the legions of highly-paid professional diplomats, academics, bankers and lawyers who theorised about matters from their ivory towers, were dealing directly with victims and so actually understood their concerns.¹⁸ More recently, studies of African trade have found that, echoing past colonialism, European and British free trade agreements have always prioritised their own economic interests over that of their nominal African partners.¹⁹ Ireland’s response to these trends has evidently been to focus on developing international law to compensate for the fact that, since the 1990s, the creation of both a UN High Commission for Human Rights and the Global Compact programme has operated on the basis seeking political mandates without possessing the legal authority to enforce compliance. Therefore, David Donoghue, a recent Irish representative to the UN who succeeded in getting over one hundred ‘developing countries’ to accept a declaration in favour of the Global Compact programme, suggested that the possibility of ‘heading in the direction of codified [human] rights’, with a degree of national freedom for each country in implementing such a legal code, was actually ‘the only way forward’ in creating a more just international order.²⁰ Some European professors of international law have echoed this belief,²¹ while the fact that the United Nations Development Programme negotiated by Donoghue also involved a clear commitment to environmentalism as part of a broader programme of health promotion may potentially serve to enhance its overall relevance.²²

In support of such initiatives, longstanding UN agencies such as UNESCO and the UN’s migration agency have argued that ‘globalisation’ (or the ‘global partnership’ system launched in 1968) is actually a social and educational issue of responsibility, not just an economic trend.²³ Irish foreign ministers have been keen to suggest that ‘central to Irish foreign policy…since the foundation of the state’ has been a promotion of humanitarian principles because ‘as a small state, we are instinctively sympathetic to the problems faced by those whose size, situation or history leaves them relatively powerless’ or are ‘afflicted by poverty and prone to natural disasters’.²⁴ Irish governments have also argued that ‘because it affects poorest communities most, climate change is a priority in our international development policy’, primarily through supporting the EU’s ‘Framework on Climate and Energy’, while Irish ex-president Mary Robinson has served as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Change.²⁵ The interconnection between the environmental movement and pre-existing UN developmental aid policies can be witnessed in EU policy documents, such as those that have drawn a direct connection between energy issues, including solar power, and the idea of sustainable economic development in Africa.²⁶ There is certainly logic to such policies, although environmental debates have also witnessed a degree of polemical attitudes. For instance, while the Holy See has championed the idea of the interrelationship between promoting universal human rights and protecting the environment,²⁷ international relations theorists within the British Commonwealth have argued that ‘immorality pretending to virtue’ and false ideas of a ‘one world religion’ have become an ever-growing feature of UN environmental debates and associated financial projects, leading in turn to a potentially dangerous subversion of national economic interests in favour of promoting false ideas of universality.²⁸ This belief may also have affected attitudes within the United States, while some Dutch scholars have suggested that philosophical opposition to ideas of universal values may be partly rooted in the fact that, in medieval times, Roman Catholic thinkers were essentially the first to express such supranational ideas as a legal concept in order to encourage a greater separation between church and state or between what were considered to be either the educated or the warrior classes.²⁹ As environmental scientists have pointed out, however, a much more relevant question was a purely logistical one; namely, the potentially great difference between the theory and practice of all climate change programmes.³⁰

Perhaps the best illustration of the viability of the Global Compact has been that, rather than rejecting the idea of a global economy, growing non-governmental organisations, in Ireland and elsewhere, have called for the reform of the operations of the global economy so that each state can better meet the set UN recommendation whereby each member state should (but rarely do) provide 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to the World Bank for the sake of developmental aid programmes, including those affecting the environment.³¹ Reflecting the priorities of bodies such as Médicins sans Frontières, since the 1960s there has been a tradition of direct Irish medical assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa,³² while a degree of sincerity to Irish attitudes may perhaps be witnessed by a recently declared willingness of the Irish government not to pursue oil exploration options (the Irish navy had suggested that there could be €850 billion worth of unmined oil directly off Ireland’s coastline)³³ purely for the sake of protecting the environment.

A very influential alternative viewpoint to the idea that ‘globalisation’ is a social and educational issue of responsibility can be found in the argument of British commentators on international relations (Marxist and non-Marxist alike) who have equated ‘globalisation’ purely with an economic trend of enforced urbanisation and have typified all ‘terrorism’ as an inevitable violent and direct reaction to this trend by poor and disaffected migrants from rural areas.³⁴ This question of urban or rural development has undoubtedly been a major factor governing the history of modern Ireland, from the great crises that the country faced during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries through to the operations of European regional development funds from the 1970s until the 2000s. However, it is perhaps on this very question of urban or rural development and its impact on migration that an Irish philosophy of international relations has been developing that mirrors mainland European and American philosophies of international relations far more so than those of the United Kingdom.

The origins of Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century could well be understood in terms of popular opposition to the role of state centralisation within the United Kingdom in deprioritising Irish urban development and, in turn, forcing both Irish urban and rural migrants to enter the English, rather than the Irish, urban labour market.³⁵ The relative popularity of successive Irish governments from the 1920s until the 1960s with the general Irish public often hinged on the government’s capacity to reverse this trend, while a Charles Haughey-inspired notion of a ‘social partnership’ between government and urban trade unions essentially became the keynote of a limited programme of Irish national economic planning from the late 1960s up until the 1990s. Peter Sutherland judged that the principal reason why Ireland and other small nations were able to capitalise upon opportunities presented by the growth of multinational businesses was that, in contrast to the experience of Europe’s industrial giants of yesteryear, ‘we did not have to dismantle shipbuilding, steel, coal—all of the industries that really crippled and paralysed the economies during the “eurosclerosis” of the 1970s and 1980s’ in order to create sufficient market space for the development of ‘new’ industries, be they pharmaceuticals, information and communications technology or digital media. At the same time, however, his advice to the Irish government and the UN Secretary General on migration and development was that it was not correct to link rural–urban migrations with security issues, even if a ‘switch from extreme tolerance to extreme intolerance’ of migrants was temporarily made evident in cities such as London and Amsterdam after it was announced that nearly half their populations were born outside their host countries.³⁶ The claim that ‘terrorism’ is a reaction against urbanisation has also been rejected by many in central Europe and America, where scholars have equated politicians’ call for a ‘war against terror’ with a rhetoric that was invented by sections of Anglophone academia in the wake of the financial reforms of 1968.³⁷

Neither an Irish nor an evolving European role in shaping international relations theory has yet to become a very recognisable feature of most British or American studies of international relations, which have tended to emphasise that efforts ‘to monopolise the means of legitimate violence’ are always necessary before any international arrangement can begin to be considered as ‘viable’.³⁸ Upon this basis, there has been a British tendency, rooted not least in centuries of its own efforts to define and maintain a balance of power within Europe,³⁹ to view the EU purely as a creation of the Cold War and to assert that the post-1945 ‘bi-polar’ European order, as well as the balance of power that it implied, should remain a permanent fixture.⁴⁰ A very remarkable continuity in British political thought has been the belief that the state of nature is a state of anarchy and, therefore, only the will of the nation-state to exercise an unnatural supremacy and dominance over the natural world and the creation of an appropriate balance of power between states creates orderly government, both nationally and internationally, as opposed to a natural and barbaric state of human anarchy.⁴¹ This philosophy, which is essentially rooted in the early-modern political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and, to a lesser extent, the idea of the national sovereignty associated with the Westphalia settlement of 1648, has been termed as the ‘English School’ of international relations as well as a ‘realist’ school of thought. It has formed an essential theoretical framework for most modern British textbooks on international relations theory, which have suggested that this ‘realist’ school of thought should also be seen as the perpetual antidote to unrealistic or ‘neo-liberal’ schools of thought, associated with the EU, that are based on the idea that militarism is not inherently the key factor in international relations.⁴² Irish foreign ministers have referred directly to this British debate only on a few occasions, but whenever they did it was generally to question its fundamental assumptions.⁴³

Although notions of an Anglo-American worldview have been prevalent within Britain since at least the days of James Bryce and Winston Churchill, the United States’ own academic debate regarding the competing roles of liberalism and republicanism in shaping perceptions of the modern world have never actually found an audience within the United Kingdom because of its inherent political antipathy to republicanism.⁴⁴ As a republic, America was always particularly conscious that ‘crusades, even crusades conducted in the name of freedom, threaten freedom at home’ since ‘the history of republican experiments across history show that foreign entanglements and adventures created dangerous concentrations of political power within and undermined the very civic virtues on which the survival of any republic depended’. On this basis, fearing corruption, Americans were still on their guard against the notion of exercising unnatural hegemonies in international affairs and perpetually inclined to question ‘to what end’ such ideas of hegemony had ever been entertained in the first place.⁴⁵ Ireland’s self-identification as a republic has never been as strong as in the case of the United States, as has been reflected by the fact that Irish studies of republicanism have tended to focus exclusively on purely domestic civics in the south rather than international relations.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, connections have been drawn between republicanism and ‘terror’ within both the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth,⁴⁷ while the tenor of Belfast commentaries on the theme may also have persuaded Irish government ministers to couch their thought in ‘liberal internationalist’ terms without ever referring to republicanism in the context of either humanitarian or internationalist values.⁴⁸ However, a clear continuity in the history of Irish involvement in international diplomacy since 1919 was a belief in the need to assert the equal right of small nations to have their liberties recognised internationally while also maintaining the integrity of the nation at home. On this basis, during the era of the League of Nations (1919–45), Ireland strove to be ‘recognised at Geneva as one of the main upholders of the complete independence of the smaller states’ as much as it was a nominal supporter of collective security,⁴⁹ while Ireland’s policy at the UN was defined largely by a search for the development of effective platforms to protect the rights of small nations while balancing this ambition with its desire to be seen as a strong supporter of the principle of collective security if it was based upon recognised principles of international law as opposed to selective military alliances based upon aspirations for imperial hegemony.⁵⁰

Long before the development of environmentalism, American philosophical debates on what constituted ‘natural’, or ‘republican’, ‘virtue’ were focused on the relationship between the urban and rural worlds. In this debate, American geography may explain why it tended to see virtue as most likely to stem from rural societies, just as English geography (particularly since the nineteenth century) may have led British commentators to adopt an opposing viewpoint.⁵¹ Although the US was essentially a champion of the EEC from its inception, levels of appreciation in America for the EU would appear to have been shaped far more by the potential of its economy (including its prospects for a more effective banking union) than either its evolving tradition of cultural diplomacy or the operation of European law.⁵² By contrast, membership of the EU has made Ireland a dedicated supporter of ‘maximising the EU’s voice and influence on human rights issues’, including codifying actual human rights legislation. Both the well-established European Court of Human Rights (based in Strasbourg, France) and the more recent International Criminal Court (based in the Hague, Netherlands) have encompassed human rights legislation that may influence future UN policy formation, but the United Kingdom has always expressed serious reservations about the former court and the United States refused to join the latter. By contrast, Ireland has declared its full support for the operations of both these courts,⁵³ even though the potential relevance of such European human rights legislation to Ireland was limited by the fact that they ‘cannot be enforced and a breach cannot be remedied in our courts’.⁵⁴ Indeed, like the United States and the United Kingdom but unlike most of Europe, Ireland has always had a common law, rather than a codified, legal system. Aside from issues of language, this legal issue could be a logical reason for greater Irish susceptibility to British or American intellectual influences. Be that as it may, in suggesting that the Irish government did not share the belief of ‘many in the world of foreign policy who see a fundamental tension between the pursuit of interests and the promotion of values’, Irish foreign ministers have been keen to emphasise their identification with both the supranational legal dimension and traditions of foreign policy consultation that have defined the EU. This has been done because of a belief that ‘multilateralism strengthens our independence, self-confidence and security rather than diminishes it’ and that the EU tradition of multilateral diplomacy can fully encompass the Irish state’s geopolitical outlook.⁵⁵

From its inception, the European project was designed to encompass the concerns of militarily neutral states, which naturally suited Ireland, while in recent times Irish diplomats have expressed appreciation for the fact that the EU is ‘perhaps best thought of as a wholly new kind of polity—most aptly described as “a Union of States and of Peoples”.’⁵⁶ Indeed, a strength of the European project and a merit in its evolving tradition of cultural diplomacy as far as Ireland was concerned was that, unlike the traditional British Commonwealth (which attempted after the 1960s to redefine itself according to UN principles), it was not based on the priorities, ideological traditions or political self-image of any single founding state.⁵⁷ Irish participation in cultural projects such as Europeana, designed to promote and protect all European cultures according to a single humanitarian standard, increased the international audience for the Irish language (Gaeilge),⁵⁸ while, more recently, the development of the EU’s Horizons digital education programme and Galileo satellite system promised to strengthen the connection between Ireland’s digital technology industries and the European continent.

The Irish desire to avoid military alliances, such as NATO, has probably been rooted primarily in a national anti-militarist tradition rather than the former British Commonwealth tradition of keeping Ireland as a neutralised state. For instance, the Irish anti-enlistment movement during the First World War clearly influenced the formative years of Dáil Éireann. Arthur Griffith had justified non-enlistment on the grounds that Britain’s imperial wars had never been a direct concern of Ireland, but nevertheless the country was forced to contribute many millions of pounds to these war efforts despite the fact that ‘every pound of that Irish gold could have been better spent in Ireland’.⁵⁹ The creation of several international pacifist organisations during the First World War encouraged an Irish expression of belief in the potential of these movements to create a new international order and evidently enhanced the Irish desire to de-emphasise military spending as much as a deep-seated Irish abhorrence of carnage. In this context, Ireland’s mere signing of the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 probably reflected national opinion less than either the ethos of the post-1920 Irish White Cross movement or de Valera’s later assertion, meant for mainland European as much as Irish ears, that ‘the chief significance of the new [Éire/Ireland] constitution’ was ‘that it bears upon its face, from the first words of its preamble to the dedication at its close, the character of the public law of a great Christian democracy’.⁶⁰

If a recent decline in the notion of a European Christian-democratic tradition has also found reflections in Ireland,⁶¹ its core philosophical belief that a literary trend of encouraging a societal acceptance of political ideologies was a tool of the totalitarian state (a reason for the great popularity of the Christian-democratic school of thought in post-1989 central and eastern European republics) nevertheless played a significant role in Irish intellectual life. It essentially motivated the Éire constitution’s purposeful distinction between human liberty (including the liberty to be entirely non-political) and political liberty on the grounds that recognition of the inherent primacy of the former is necessary if basic cultural freedoms and individuals’ rights and liberties are to be protected under all circumstances.⁶² The role of Christian-democratic ideas and politics after 1945 in countering ideological polemics, as well as potentially totalitarian ideas, in Europe has been recognised widely because it shaped founders of the European project, such as Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenaeur (also founder of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union), and it also inspired individuals like Jacques Maritain, a creator of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights; a document that attempted to make the American and French republican legal principle of the inherent equality of all human beings a universal value.⁶³ After 1989, however, both Western media and diplomats generally associated this question of equality with notions of a liberal individualism, based upon the rhetoric of promoting non-discriminatory values, rather than either a republican patriotism or legal internationalism. Reputedly, this made the west of Europe largely deaf to central European calls for Europe to unite behind ‘the spirit of 1989’; a trend that, it has even been suggested, could potentially lead the EU to become divorced intellectually from the founding fathers of the EEC itself.⁶⁴

Ireland’s second foreign policy white paper, The Global Island: Ireland’s foreign policy for a changing world (2015), essentially invited the country to reflect on its state within the global economy more so than its status as a European nation. In this context, a perceived weakness of Ireland abroad compared to other ‘small nation’ success stories, such as that of Israel, had been its economic dependence upon foreign direct investment without necessarily boosting either its national labour market or productivity in essential resources.⁶⁵ However, efforts have evidently been made in recent years to compensate for this fact and to increase the number of Irish businesses that also operated abroad, with as many as 500 Irish companies reportedly operating in the United States.⁶⁶ In terms of trade in goods, a perpetual limitation to Ireland’s capacity to be a significant export-orientated nation was underdeveloped Irish shipping. The fact that ‘sea based transport accounts for 99 per cent of Ireland’s trade [in goods]’ had always been seen by the Irish navy as a reason to expand the operations of Irish mercantile fleets.⁶⁷ Instead, however, there was a consistent reliance upon employing British transport firms, so much so that the latter have been described as practically serving as Ireland’s ‘land bridge’ to both the United Kingdom and, in turn, the European continent.⁶⁸ Multinational companies who exported actual goods (as opposed to banking assets) from Ireland did so primarily to the same countries as did traditional Irish food exporters: namely, the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, ‘northern Europe’ rather than other regions.⁶⁹ If the use of British shipping seemed more cost effective than creating an Irish mercantile marine, the fact remained that if Britain opted out of a free trade agreement with Europe at any time after 1973 Ireland would not have been able to rely on British shipping without facing customs in transporting its goods to other European countries despite its own continued European membership. Nevertheless, the potential availability of European shipping services as an alternative may explain the Irish government’s willingness to allow for the disbandment of Irish Shipping Limited as early as 1984.⁷⁰

Ever since 1968, in Ireland as elsewhere, over 70 per cent of banks’ savings have tended to be invested in international ‘financial services’ schemes, rather than in national goods-based industries, simply because banks can earn much greater returns from such investments.⁷¹ If international criticisms of growing disparities of wealth across the world and the evident supremacy of bankers’ and economists’ market forecasts over parliaments in determining government policies, both nationally and internationally, have also found echoes in Ireland, the most critical issue in terms of the country’s potential economic vulnerability was perhaps imbalances in terms of its trade in goods and services. In recent times, however, a balance of sorts has evidently existed in various aspects of Ireland’s trade in goods within Europe. For instance, the reported total of exported Irish goods to Germany (€10 billion) has operated according to a positive balance of trade of roughly €2 billion and this has been on an equal scale to Ireland’s reported total export of ‘services’ to Germany (€10.5 billion),⁷² which evidently relates to banking transactions exclusively. Perhaps surprisingly, a similar balance has reportedly existed in Irish trade in goods and services with the United States.⁷³ By contrast, total trade in goods between Canada and Ireland (€2.75 billion) has only been a fifth of the amount of banking investments between the two countries.⁷⁴ A similar imbalance probably accounts for a very high percentage of (a recently claimed) €16 billion worth of Irish exports of ‘goods and services’ to both India and China,⁷⁵ just as an EU–Singapore trade deal reportedly saw a very sudden emergence of Irish ‘investments’ in Singapore of €5 billion.⁷⁶ Countries like Canada, India and Singapore either are or have been pivots of traditional British imperial banking markets, with the latter two being closely related to banking developments in the Far East as well as Australia and New Zealand. With these same countries in mind, Northern Ireland has expressed a desire to compete with the Republic’s ‘unfair’ advantage of having a low corporate tax rate for attracting internationally focused investment firms.⁷⁷ This may indicate that many banks or companies that utilised Dublin’s IFSC were British ones,⁷⁸ with the principal difference between such companies and those operating within either Northern Ireland or on the island of Britain being that their Dublin offices traded exclusively in euros. By contrast, a claim that as much as $2 billion worth of trade occurred between America and Ireland every week would point to an evident supremacy of American business or banking interests among international investment firms operating within Ireland.⁷⁹

The contemporary European context of such developments are less in evidence in the activites of the European Central Bank, which manages the European currency, than in the operations of the European Development Bank and the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which have been the basis for EU investments across the continent of Europe as well as into Central Asia and the Middle East.⁸⁰ The impact of this trend on Ireland can be witnessed in the fact that while sizeable Irish food exports to the Middle East have evidently continued since the 1980s, only €400 million of nearly €4 billion worth of reported Irish exports to the Middle East evidently constituted traditional Irish food exports,⁸¹ which may well indicate that most ‘exports’ are simply banking investments made to enhance the diplomatic soft power of the EU. Participation in EU trading agreements also saw the development of new Irish trading links with Latin America (€3 billion total trade), whose Mercosur trading bloc has been holding economic summits with the EU since 1998,⁸² and a professed likelihood of Ireland entering into significant future African trading markets, presumably as soon as the African Union project grows stronger.⁸³ If this has been what Ireland’s acceptance of the role of being a European hub within a ‘global economy’ has meant in practice, it is possible that its impact on Ireland’s diplomatic stance may be to make economics, rather than humanitarianism, the practical basis of its engagement with the developing world as far as the international community at large was concerned, irrespective of the specific moral postures adopted by Irish foreign ministers, the UN or non-government organisations. However, in contrast to Karen Devine’s suggestion that Ireland’s membership of the Eurozone was leading the country into being exclusively preoccupied with improving the EU’s capacity to shape globalisation, the increase in the number of multilateral and bilateral forums available to Ireland through Europe has undoubtedly served to enhance its own diplomatic voice. In particular, a direct historical correlation has existed between an expansion in Ireland’s role in foreign trade and the increase in size of Ireland’s diplomatic service. Indeed, the recent suggestion that the very status of Ireland as a small open economy is precisely ‘why a strong international presence matters’, rather than the reverse, might be said to betray a normalisation of Irish state’s approach to international relations.⁸⁴

In British debates on Europe, there was an acknowledgement that if Britain were not in the EU ‘it will be hard for the UK to maintain its influence in areas where access to EU markets and, in some cases, the prospect of EU membership is a powerful policy lever’ as well as for it to sustain ‘its role as a diplomatic “bridge” between the US and Europe’.⁸⁵ The centrality of naval considerations to America’s overall approach to diplomacy worldwide can certainly explain the comparative limit of Ireland’s appeal as a bridge between America and Europe when compared to other European states. If Germany was the economic heart of Europe, the French were more inclined to offer a naval conception of the potential evolution of EU–American relations,⁸⁶ while the British were keen to advertise the greater extra-European significance of their own navy.⁸⁷ The American preoccupation with international defence spending, as well as a strong tradition of naval intelligence-sharing with the British Commonwealth,⁸⁸ was evidently self-interested rather than governed by national biases. The inclusion of Canada and Australia, but not Britain, within the same group as the United States in G20 summits and Australia’s concentration since the 1980s upon developing its own trading relations with Asia and Latin America (not least by means of its own novel initiative of the Cairns Group)⁸⁹ partly reflected America’s priorities in this regard, just as the likelihood of fresh EU trade agreements with Australia and India, in addition to Canada (which evidently encouraged the Irish government to view its own North American strategy as applying equally to the United States and Canada),⁹⁰ pointed to the fact that although the British Commonwealth could still act as a united front at the UN and in times of war it was no longer a means specifically for the United Kingdom to exercise an economic leverage internationally. Against this backdrop, Ireland’s ‘cold war era’ notion of the existence of an ‘Anglo-American protectorate’⁹¹ may have been of far less relevance than the question of how EU–American relations could work to the strategic interests of both.

Historically, the question of Britain’s ‘western approaches’ practically served to make Ireland ‘a neutralised state’, dependent on the UK for national defence, during the era of naval armament races between 1922 and 1945. Notwithstanding the Cold War, Ireland’s disinclination to revise such geopolitical considerations after it left the British Commonwealth or, indeed, at any time before 1991 was perhaps a curious oversight of government.⁹² A peculiar origin of the Irish culture of anti-militarism can be seen in the fact that a future general secretary of the Irish department of foreign affairs found it ‘deeply disturbing’ during 1970 to learn that a close departmental colleague thought that the Irish state and its army should concentrate on developing a better national security strategy, immediately denouncing this suggestion as being equivalent to an irrational advocacy of political violence.⁹³ The origins of this way of thought within the Irish civil service was a belief that ‘the peace of our own state’ was dependent largely on a purely internal security consenus, whereby, aside from the activity of the police force and the churches, politicians were expected to keep an ever-watchful eye on the Irish public to stem the rise of military sentiments of any kind, thereby sustaining the idea that the army must act only as an aid to the civil power of the police and not develop a comprehensive national and international defence policy.⁹⁴ The Irish government believed not only that the Irish public would always oppose any extension in the Irish army’s responsibilities in national or international affairs but also that the Irish army could never cope with assuming a defence responsibility for the whole island, should this theoretical situation ever arise, and therefore partition should be welcomed as a guarantor of both peace and security for the whole island.⁹⁵ This perhaps raises questions regarding the practicality of Ireland’s longstanding professed desire to see an eventual political reunification of the island by a process of consent. For instance, it would appear that the confinement of the activities of the Irish navy and air corps to purely coast guard services from 1945 onwards was an almost incomprehensible sense of patriotism to those educated under the UK’s system of state education within Northern Ireland.⁹⁶ Both Ulster and Scotland retained an almost inherent geopolitical significance to the policing of the sea lanes of the North Atlantic.

International regard for the Irish army’s service in forty-two UN sponsored international peacekeeping missions after 1958 (in the process, suffering eighty-six casualties) did not prevent many Irish policy makers from expressing a deep fear of the Irish army being expected to partake in any future military, as opposed to purely policing, UN operations abroad.⁹⁷ After the establishment of the EU, Irish governments were occasionally more willing to accede to the Irish military’s requests to purchase supplies for the Irish army from many different countries,⁹⁸ but there was still an unwillingness to consider financing a more comprehensive Irish national defence programme. In a sense, this was unavoidable: the geopolitics of partition effectively negated the possibility of conceiving of the island of Ireland as a geopolitical entity with the need for a comprehensive military, naval and air defence policy. Notwithstanding its own brand of localism, this perspective was probably understood better in Belfast than in Dublin due to the extent to which politics within the former city were also shaped by broader British international debates.

European and ‘Anglo-American’ worldviews reputedly played a competing role in shaping the evolution of Ireland’s diplomatic identity ever since Ireland’s adoption of the Euro currency in 2002. Potentially the greatest disruption to Europe and Ireland’s role within it, however, arose from Britain’s evident interest in leaving the EU. As only seventeen of the twenty-seven EU states were, as yet, members of the Eurozone, in the wake of the post-2008 financial crisis the notion of a two-tier Europe became more prevalent, with the Eurozone countries, including Ireland, supposedly receiving preferential treatment through occupying the ‘top’ tier. Against this backdrop, Pat Cox predicted during 2015 that Britain would soon leave the EU because of a combination of two factors: first, it was being relegated to the second-tier of Europe due to its non-membership of the Eurozone; and second, historic British desires to be a direct economic rival, rather than ally, of Germany were still strong.⁹⁹ Hitherto Britain had considered that it could better match American power within the EU than without, but British historians had long pointed out that the UK had never identified with the notion of a regional identity for Europe and so exhibited no genuine desire to be a part of any commonwealth that it could not lead or use purely for its own national advantage.¹⁰⁰ The most critical issue, however, was evidently the differing priorities of the sterling area and eurozone, with a former Irish ambassador to Britain noting that, although Ireland desired close relations on all sides, there was a seemingly unavoidable reality that ‘if the UK stays in the EU, the gap between British preferences and Eurozone realities will widen’, potentially to the disadvantage of both.¹⁰¹

A significant difference between the WTO and the GATT arrangements that preceded it was that, aside from trade in goods, the WTO rules also covered issues of intellectual property and the operations of financial services. The latter issue was potentially very important to Britain because even in the event that it arranged, as a non-member state, a new free trade deal with the EU, this deal could not have covered financial services, which was a key British strategic interest globally in terms of using sterling to leverage the international system.¹⁰² If British voters were concerned about migration, Britain’s non-membership of the Schengen Area effectively made this a non-issue, which indicated that the essential context of the British government’s decision to hold a referendum to leave the EU was not a concern about migration or even trade in goods but rather a purely foreign policy desire to enable Britain to better deal with America’s desire to reform the World Bank system that underpinned both the WTO and the financing of NATO. Ideas about reforming the WTO were coloured by rival American and Chinese efforts to utilise alternative banking alliances for the sake of maintaining their competitive economic advantages, just as providing or denying access to international banks’ payment systems had long been used as a political leverage tool by the United States, particularly in the Middle East. In terms of central banks’ reserves, the Euro had rapidly outgrown the British pound and Japanese yen to become the world’s second most traded currency after the US dollar. However, the EU declared itself unwilling to use its own currency as a leverage tool in international relations in a manner comparable to the US dollar or, in yesteryear, the pound sterling.¹⁰³

The expressed desire of the Westminster parliament (which is sovereign under the UK’s unwritten constitution) to unilaterally determine the terms of Britain’s departure pointed to the possibility of WTO arbitration being necessary in the event that Britain refused to come to a new trading agreement with the EU but as WTO arbitrations had hitherto involved trade relations between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries only, the idea of Britain attempting to act exclusively under WTO trading rules only was widely deemed to be both imbalanced and counterproductive. The WTO itself estimated that if Britain traded only under WTO rules it could result in a loss to Britain’s gross domestic product of up to 90 trillion dollars (or nearly thirty times the size of the gross domestic product of the entire African continent) within fifteen years, and, therefore, Britain should recognise the folly of this idea.¹⁰⁴ The Irish government’s response to this development was essentially to re-emphasise its belief in the central significance of the EU to contemporary international relations. For instance, a surprising initiation within Britain of an inverted rhetoric on the theme of an alleged European belligerence prompted an Irish Taoiseach to re-emphasise Ireland’s sense of identification with the EU on the grounds that ‘the EU is not just an entity of a single market and customs unions; it is the longest lasting peace process on the planet’.¹⁰⁵ Meanwhile, Ireland responded to Britain’s vote to leave the EU by stating that Ireland’s future relations specifically with Britain ‘will be underpinned by the Common Travel Area and the Good Friday Agreement’.¹⁰⁶

Ever since the cessation of the occupation of Iraq (2003–11), Britain had claimed that there was a need for what it termed as ‘hard borders’ for a new ‘fortress Europe’ to protect it against the terrorist threat of migration from the Islamic world. This was a claim that the subsequent civil war and refugee crisis in Syria was supposed to validate,¹⁰⁷ although Mediterranean EU countries (perhaps most notably Greece) with a first-hand experience of both the Syrian refugee situation and the Mediterranean Union project generally deemed migration to be a purely humanitarian question, as did Turkey. However, EU summit declarations upon such matters often did not reflect a united foreign policy stance in practice,¹⁰⁸ while a specific problem for Ireland arising from Britain’s vote to leave the EU was that Britain’s own professed readiness to erect a ‘hard border’ for the United Kingdom threatened to undo the operations of the free movement of labour between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland ever since The Agreement, endangering an on-going peace process by returning matters to a pre-1994 situation. A complicating factor in this situation was that were it not for a belief that the legal loophole of a ‘common travel area’ was a means to maintain peace in Northern Ireland,¹⁰⁹ Ireland would probably never have requested, alongside Britain, a special exemption provision with regards to the operations of the EU’s Schengen Area and, in turn, continued to seek to accommodate Irish social security programmes with British as much as European standards.¹¹⁰ While the Irish government evidently viewed this question primarily in terms of the peace process, the UK government viewed the ‘common travel area’ primarily as a means of strengthening its links with Ireland irrespective of the operations of the EU,¹¹¹ leading it to increase greatly (almost triple) its volume of trade with Ireland after it voted to leave the EU in 2016.¹¹² The Irish business community’s facilitation of this process may have indicated to Britain that its power to influence the future of Ireland remained strong and perhaps even stronger than the EU,¹¹³ although the Irish government, if seemingly willing to promote an interdependence with Britain,¹¹⁴ accepted that the future status of the Irish border must be determined between Britain and Europe alone as part of an overall agreement regarding the future of UK–EU diplomatic and trade relations.¹¹⁵

A majority of the residents of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU during the UK’s successful June 2016 referendum to leave, partly because, by 2011, the economic reasoning of the Northern Ireland Assembly had pointed to a process of parallel economic evolution with the Republic. Domestic Ulster businesses, like those in the Republic, were mostly small-to-medium sized firms that needed access to the largest possible markets, while there was also a growing desire in Ulster to attract more multinational businesses in a fashion akin to the system operating in the Republic. This pointed to the relative significance of the Euro zone and the sterling area in determining long-term developments both within the operations of the global economy and as a practical basis of Ireland’s peace process ever since the banking reforms of the late 1990s had underpinned The Agreement. Some deemed this as evidence that a choice was now being presented to Northern Ireland whether or not it wished to act purely as a peripheral and regional economy of the UK, sustained by British state subsidies, or embrace more fully the notion of an all-island economy within a Europe free trade zone in an effort to meet its economic need to promote local businesses, attract more foreign direct investments and reach the largest possible export markets.¹¹⁶ Implicit in this idea was that the prospect of the UK leaving the EU was raising as many questions, or choices, for Ulster as the formation of the EU itself had done for Éire.

Ever since the registration of The Agreement with the UN in 1998, the situation in Northern Ireland was considered by the Irish government to be a significant factor in shaping ‘our international reputation’ primarily because ‘sharing our experience of peace and reconciliation on the island of Ireland’ was practically an international expectation.¹¹⁷ As Britain’s ‘common travel area agreement’ with Ireland related to the movement of labour rather than goods, an all-island Irish economy was practically dependent on the existence of free trade between the UK and the EU. InterTrade Ireland, established as a result of The Agreement, would note that cross-border trade amounted to only 5 per cent of the total value of the trade of each (if financial services were included), but this cross-border trade was nevertheless critical in assisting those border regions that had suffered the most economically from the Troubles,¹¹⁸ as was partly reflected by the fact that if cross-boder exports from the North amounted to only a small percentage of Northern trade in terms of value, it nevertheless amounted to over 35 per cent of Northern trade specifically in terms of volume of goods, while half of all cross-border trade constituted agri-food exports.¹¹⁹ One of the chief significances of The Agreement was that, in the name of sustaining interlocking relationships, it was designed to maintain a perpetual all-island dialogue to ensure that developments in either part of Ireland should not be allowed to adversely affect the other. If the mass exoduses of the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s and the resulting rise in political extremism pointed to a downside of Ireland’s common labour market with Britain, the declared interest of both the EU and the United States not to allow any future trading agreement with Britain unduly undermine the Irish economy was evidently governed by an awareness that any renegotiation of a UK–EU, or indeed a UK–US, trade agreement was likely to take much longer than an exiting process under article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. If this necessitated the maintenance of a united EU stance in the matter, it also meant that the factors governing the peace that had been established as a result of The Agreement had become more internationalised, reflecting the long-term operations of the global economy as much as political or community relations within the North itself. Furthermore, the fact that Britain’s trade with its Commonwealth had declined from over half of British exports in the wake of the Second World War to under 10 per cent indicated the importance of very harmonious relations with Europe if it was to deal effectively with its internal economic challenges.¹²⁰

Against this backdrop, Jennifer Todd suggested that the political attitudes of Northern Irish citizens may be developing in a fashion more akin to ‘liberal nationalist’ than ‘realist’ (militarist) attitudes towards international relations.¹²¹ This may point to a cultural impact having been made by either the EU or the continued existence of all-Ireland civic dialogues. For much of the twentieth century, however, Northern Ireland’s influence over media attitudes towards international affairs in the Republic was evidently much stronger than the other way around.¹²² This reflected the legacy of Belfast’s practical status as a banking capital of Ireland during Ireland’s membership of the sterling area, making Northern Ireland a means for London to exercise a British political leverage over the island as a whole. This leverage practically ceased, however, upon the establishment of the independence of the Bank of England in 1997 and the Central Bank of Ireland’s federation with the European Central Bank in 1998, both of which coincided with a rapid growth in the Irish economy (which took veteran economists and tenured academics in Ireland completely by surprise)¹²³ and also facilitated The Agreement. One testament to the success of The Agreement was that trends in international migration had not resulted in greater emigration from either part of Ireland from the 1990s onwards. Indeed, by the 2010s, for the first time since the era of the Great Famine of 1845–51, the all-island population of Ireland had risen to about 6.5 million people, with as little as 6 per cent of labour within the Republic now employed within agriculture.¹²⁴ The latter statistic, as well as patterns of migration (both to and from the country),¹²⁵ pointed to an evident transformation of modern Ireland. However, the Irish department of foreign affairs still found it necessary to offer €3 million annually to approximately 150 ‘community, voluntary and civil society organisations’ within Northern Ireland through the operations of a ‘Reconciliation Fund’ in order to help Northern Ireland deal with the fact that it ‘remains a very deeply divided society’ where a ‘fault line runs through education, housing and many other aspects of daily life’.¹²⁶

By the twenty-first century, Ireland’s diplomatic corps had risen to over eighty representatives or about a third of the size of the foreign office of the United Kingdom,¹²⁷ although its profile in Northern Ireland remained low during decades of shared EU membership. Indeed, the ongoing reality of a divergent educational, commercial and political system in Northern Ireland made the development of an all-island sense of patriotism unlikely, even if there were perhaps greater economic reasons than in the past, both nationally and internationally, for many to potentially welcome the idea of an all-Ireland state. Critically, if the removal of a NATO presence within Northern Ireland reflected a decline in Ulster’s geopolitical significance, this did not mean that Northern Ireland had ceased to be a party to the British Commonwealth’s overall defence arrangements or that its citizens necessarily came to identify with the Irish national tradition of anti-belligerence, the most practical manifestation of which has been Ireland’s role in developing multilateral diplomatic alliances in support of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including a desire to actually ban all nuclear weapons. Although no major military power (including the United Kingdom) has supported Ireland’s efforts in this regard, during 2008 Ireland persuaded almost a hundred countries and many more non-governmental organisations to sign a treaty that attempted to ban cluster-bomb munitions and thereafter also found new allies on the issue of nuclear weapons.¹²⁸ Meanwhile, although Britain expressed a definite resolve to leave the EU it exhibited no desire to leave NATO, a body in which it has remained a senior partner. Therefore, the UK was bound to continue to play a critical role in European defence. An unanswered question, however, was how it could play such a role effectively when withdrawing from the EU inherently meant that Britain could no longer take a direct part in the EU’s common foreign and security policy or have direct access to European markets.¹²⁹ If the British military tradition were to play a major role in determining the nature of the UK’s future relations with European countries, this could well affect educational and political attitudes within Northern Ireland, although (in keeping with Todd’s theory) it would appear that Britain’s preference has been to maintain as close an economic relationship with the EU as can fit its envisioned role of working with the United States to reform the WTO with an eye to the situation in the Far East. In such an event, this may result in an enhanced role for the EU in shaping diplomatic relations with the Middle East and Eurasia and a decline in the relative importance of NATO.

A likely challenge for Ireland resulting from Britain’s resolve to leave the EU will be how to define its own place in Europe now that the chief anti-federalist voice (Britain) is liable to be silenced. The prevalence of graduates of the College of Europe, which has its headquarters in Bruges and Warsaw, specifically among younger Irish diplomatic staff may make it seem likely that the country’s sense of European identity will grow stronger. However, a combination of longstanding educational and geopolitical factors might also serve to limit such a trend. Considerable ‘soft power’ has been inherent in British initiatives such as the Association of Commonwealth Universities, which was based on a sense of the global reach of both the English language and English publishing companies with a shared world view,¹³⁰ while the UK itself has been rated as the most influential ‘soft power’ in the world, meaning that its capacity to shape international discourse for its own ends is virtually unparalleled.¹³¹ If such factors naturally shaped the evolution of Irish academia during the early years of the state, more recently a growing business model for university education, in Ireland and elsewhere, has encouraged bodies such as Science Foundation Ireland to argue that collaboration with British universities was still essential for Ireland, both to access research funding schemes and to convince international stakeholders of the quality of Irish research. This business model for higher education in Ireland can explain why a recent report has shown that three-quarters of Irish academics have deemed the existence of very close links specifically between Irish and British universities to be ‘very important’ to their career prospects, as well as their scholarly priorities or interests.¹³² Those willing to consider the possibility of a different model for higher education in Ireland nevertheless also desired that the UK remain a part of the European Research Area so that the priorities of Irish universities would not have to be reinvented,¹³³ while public ‘think-tanks’ on international relations within Ireland have continued to invite participation primarily from British lecturers.¹³⁴ In this sense, if (as one Irish diplomat unflatteringly described the situation) Ireland was not ‘psychologically ready’ to ‘stand up for ourselves diplomatically’ because ‘we’ve been hiding behind British skirts institutionally for donkey’s years’,¹³⁵ the ethos of the Irish university system may actually be the most logical cause of this situation. If this situation continues, the suggestion of David O’Sullivan, a former Irish diplomat and an EU ambassador to the United States, that ‘the role of academic, cultural and scientific bodies in fostering a greater sense of shared interests will be key’ in terms of the future diplomatic relations of all European nations (including Ireland) with the United States,¹³⁶ is perhaps unlikely to elicit an efficient Irish response.

The fact that American and European journals of Irish studies such as Éire-Ireland (Minnesota, established 1966), Études Irlandaises (Rennes, established 1976), Estudios Irlandeses (Salamanca, established 1994) and Studi Irlandesi (Florence, established 2011) have evidently inspired studies of Irish literature exclusively, rather than studies of either the international profile of the Irish state or the respective bilateral relations between Ireland and their host countries, may be something of an inevitable consequence of Irish academics’ lack of intellectual engagement with the world of American or European interests and ideas. In such matters, like all states, Ireland would appear to have a quite strong sense of its own national traditions. One aspect of this has been an almost purely diaspora-conscious programme of Irish cultural diplomacy. However, both during and after Ireland’s initial struggle for independence, perceptions of Ireland within the English-speaking world were coloured by the fact that the British and, in turn, American governments were inclined to equate the Irish diaspora purely with internal questions of ethnic relations, or labour politics, within their own jurisdictions rather than a manifestation of the emergence of Ireland as a distinct nation on the international stage.¹³⁷ As such, a reliance upon a diaspora policy could potentially backfire upon Irish governments, even if a greater Irish concentration upon dealing directly with the US government from the time of the Kennedy presidency onwards evidently helped to create a stronger Irish diplomatic relationship with the United States without necessarily lessening the significance of the diaspora concept as an aspect of the Irish state’s limited soft power.

As neighbouring islands, shared geopolitical considerations between Britain and Ireland may have been inevitable throughout much of history: technological advances as well as globalised communications, or business, networks have not altered how nature inherently makes all states ‘prisoners of geography’ and climate,¹³⁸ while even in the world of high finance it has been suggested that the significant role played by Irish figures such as Peter Sutherland, be it in Europe, the WTO or even Ireland’s peace process, would have been lessened were it not for their close business and social ties with significant British influencers.¹³⁹ The most significant geopolitical fact regarding Ireland, however, may actually be that ‘the country’s physical geography is deceptively cruel’, as ‘the country is shaped like a saucer, the coastal areas tending to be higher than the interior’, which consequently has short rivers and frequently poor land.¹⁴⁰ As an island, Ireland’s coastline is not only its greatest attraction spot for tourism, travel and urban development but it also remains its essential connection to the wider world. Irish governments have recently suggested that ‘although geographically a small island on the periphery of Europe, Ireland’s people and our outlook are [now] global, influenced by and connecting with people and events around the world’,¹⁴¹ but, if this has been the case, then the world of international trade and commerce has been the essential source of that connection, as well as perhaps the greatest potential resident in the country’s diaspora concept, as reflected by the recent creation of ‘a global Irish network’ of Irish businesses abroad.¹⁴²

As a European state, in the light of the fact that new EU entrants have tended to look upon Ireland as a potential role model despite its lack of involvement with NATO, Ireland could conceivably play a more significant role in the future in European integration plans, should the country become more involved in a process of European cultural diplomacy. In practice, however, while the department of the Taoiseach has pronounced that ‘Ireland will always be at the heart of the common Europe we have helped to build’,¹⁴³ Ireland’s European policy would appear to have always been governed by more traditional ‘western European’ factors, such as differing attitudes of EU leaders towards the role of the Atlanticist financial world in governing the operations of bodies such as NATO. In this context, if France has always remained sympathetic to the idea of lessening European dependence on America, Ireland and several small states (perhaps most notably the Netherlands) tended to support Germany in defending the status quo,¹⁴⁴ just as extant fears of Russian militarism have evidently ensured that countries like Poland have been very eager to see the perpetuation of collective security arrangements that had formerly been championed by both Britain and the United States.¹⁴⁵ As NATO and EU have remained ‘essential partners’,¹⁴⁶ this may inherently limit the relevance of Ireland to countries like Poland and its neighbours because of the absence of direct Irish involvement in the military aspects of European security. In itself, this may also explain why Ireland’s level of engagement with European cultural diplomacy has hitherto remained comparatively low.¹⁴⁷

Perhaps most of all, the evolution of Irish international relations, past and present, points to a state whose most enduring values and principles have been based on its declared constitutional goal since 1937 of seeking purely ‘pacific settlement of international disputes’ according to ‘generally recognised principles of international law’. Since the mid twentieth century, this anti-belligerent stance was championed by a combination of promoting disarmament talks in forums of multilateral diplomacy, engaging in UN peacekeeping, promoting the development of humanitarian law and avoiding military alliances. It has been suggested that Ireland’s non-membership of NATO in its performance of these tasks may actually have served to better advertise the distinctiveness of its own diplomatic voice.¹⁴⁸ It might be more accurate to argue that Ireland has attempted to present an example to the world of attempting to support international alliances politically whilst simultaneously emphasising that such alliances do not have to be based upon military power. This can explain its consistent commitment to multilateralism, whereby ‘the principal normative objective from a multilateralist perspective is contribution to the creation of universal rules’.¹⁴⁹ Whether or not such ‘rules’ can encompass moral as much as economic standards may become the key issue in determining if the future will be governed as much as the past by the exercise of military hegemonies.¹⁵⁰

American theorists who have drawn a contrast between ‘hard’ (military) and ‘soft’ (cultural) power have always emphasised that these concepts are not mutually exclusive.¹⁵¹ In fact, their necessary combination has been described as the exercise of ‘smart power’.¹⁵² An alternative idea of ‘smart power’, however, may lie in the claim that battles are frequently won or lost purely in the world of ideas. In particular, for any state’s diplomatic relations to prove effective they generally need to be based upon ideas and interests that are as relevant and applicable to their audience as much as they are to their authors. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Ireland’s embrace of the EU was evidently governed less by ideology than a purely practical consideration that it was a comparable forum to the UN for economic, cultural and humanitarian diplomacy, as well as non-belligerent peacekeeping. The EU’s potential capacity to make this strategy effective stemmed not least from its growing status as the world’s largest trading bloc with a tradition of close foreign policy consultation. In effect, within the combination of these two forums of the UN and EU, the Irish state professed to have found a means to discover a fully aligned place within the world of international relations that could match the historic, political and cultural traditions of the Irish nation itself, including with regards to its (perhaps evolving) attitudes towards both geopolitics and questions of security. There would appear to be little reason to doubt the accuracy of this claim. In addition, if Ireland’s ‘messages to the free nations of the world’ have begun to find a more receptive audience this could well be said to have also vindicated many of the visions of the founding fathers and authors of the Irish state itself. Should such a trend continue, there would seem to be little reason to doubt that Ireland will have a significant international story to tell as a small European nation. In addition, should Ireland develop a deeper interest in European traditions of cultural diplomacy this process may end up being reciprocated, thereby potentially enhancing the security of Ireland on the world stage through a process of mutual understanding, political cooperation and intellectual engagement. To a significant degree, this would be in keeping with the professed aspiration of a former Irish foreign minister who suggested that Europe should be seen neither as an economic nor a cultural construct but instead as a genuine leader in promoting world peace and, last but not least, a perpetual, vibrant and viable ‘marketplace for ideas’.¹⁵³

Endnotes

1 Martin Mansergh, ‘Creating a new state’, address at La Touche Legacy Weekend, 30 Sep. 2017.

2 D.H. Akenson, The United States and Ireland (Harvard, 1973), ix.

3 Brian MacArthur (ed.), The Penguin book of twentieth-century speeches (London, 1999), 218–21.

4 Ciara Chambers, Ireland in the newsreels (Dublin, 2012).

5 Michael Mulreany (ed.), Economic Development fifty years on (Dublin, 2009), quote p. 75.

6 Garret FitzGerald, Ireland in the world: further reflections (Dublin, 2005), 23. FitzGerald was given a state funeral when he died in 2011.

7 J.M. Morton, The new Ireland (London, 1938). Irish-Belgian parallels were the themes of John O’Leary, ‘Some guarantees for the protestant and unionist minority’, Dublin University Review, vol. 2, no. 12 (Dec. 1886), 959–65; Eugene Davis, Souvenirs of Irish footprints over Europe (Dublin, 1889) and Erskine Childers, ‘Christian democracy in Belgium’, Studies, vol. 2 (1913). For Dutch parallels, see Owen McGee, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 2015), 64–6, 90–5.

8 Fintan O’Toole, The ex-isle of Erin: images of a global Ireland (Dublin, 1997); Tom Garvin, Preventing the future (Dublin, 2005).

9 Frans Alting von Geusau, European unification into the twenty-first century (Tilburg, 2012); Neither justice nor order: reflections on the state of the law of nations (Tilburg, 2014).

10 Robinson drew a good deal of her inspiration as a human rights activist from religion as much as from legal developments. See Mary Robinson, Everybody matters: a memoir (London, 2013).

11 Michael Franczak, ‘Losing the battle, winning the war: neo-conservatives versus the new international order 1974–82’, Diplomatic history, vol. 43, no. 5 (2019), 867–89.

12 Zara Steiner, ‘On writing international history’, International affairs, vol. 73 no. 3 (Jul. 1997), 531.

13 This was witnessed principally in the Irish media. G.T. Dempsey, From the embassy (Dublin, 2003), 52, 189. See also Michael Cox, ‘Bringing in the “International”: the IRA ceasefire and the end of the cold war’, International affairs, vol. 73, no. 4 (1997).

14 Helen O’Neill, ‘The evolution of Ireland’s foreign aid over the past twenty years’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 24 (2013), 193.

15 M. Kennedy, D. McMahon (eds) Obligations and responsibilities: Ireland and the United Nations (Dublin, 2005), 362–83. The Irish police force also participated in many UN missions. Ibid., 343–61.

16 Kevin McCarthy, ‘Irish Aid and the Defence Forces: a synthesis of humanitarian forces or an incompatible union’, Defence Forces review (2009), 33–43 (quote p. 35). Cooperation by NATO forces with non-governmental humanitarian organisations in Kosovo and Chad was also very rare. Graham Heaslip, ‘Challenges of civil military cooperation and the coordination of humanitarian relief’, Defence Forces review (2010), 49–62.

17 Philippe Legrain, Open World: the truth about globalisation (London, 2002), 183 (quote), 205, 264.

18 Interview with Mary Robinson, International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 92, no. 877 (Apr. 2010).

19 Chinedum Muotto, ‘Re-imagining the African Continental Free Trade Area and the future of the EU–African partnership’, Institute of international and European affairs, Emerging voices (Dublin, 2019), 129–45. Belgium and, to a lesser extent, Holland have been to the fore in influencing European attitudes towards Africa, as is witnessed by the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM). Meanwhile, Irish developmental aid to Tanzania has resulted in trade agreements, leading to approximately €1 million of imports from Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, but as much as €6 million worth of Irish exports to Tanzania. B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 157–61.

20 David Donoghue, plenary speech at Royal Irish Academy conference on Multilateralism and Interdependence, 2 May 2018. In the 2015 negotiations, Donoghue was given the job of representing ‘the global north’ and worked with a Kenyan as the representative of ‘the global south’ in negotiating with the G77, which really involved 134 countries or two-thirds of the entire membership of the UN.

21 Frans Alting von Geusau, Neither justice nor order: reflections on the state of the law of nations (Tilburg, 2014). See also Paul Craig, Gráinne de Burca, EU Law (3rd ed., Oxford, 2003), 317–40.

22 United Nations Development Programme, Sustainable development goals in short (New York and Geneva, 2016).

23 See, for example, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Global citizenship education: preparing learners for the challenges of the twenty-first century (Paris, 2014).

24 Charles Flanagan, ‘Identity and values in Irish foreign policy’, Irish studies in international affairs (2016), 1–5.

25 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Global Island: Ireland’s foreign policy for a changing world (Dublin, 2015), 42–3 (quote p. 42).

26 European Political Strategy Centre, Ten trends reshaping climate and energy (Brussels, 2018).

27 See, for instance, http://web.unep.org/environmentassembly/holy-see.

28 Michael Hart, Hubris: the troubling science, economics and politics of climate change (Ottawa, 2015), 450–518, 559–72 (quotes pp. 451, 559).

29 Frans Alting von Geusau, European unification into the twenty-first century (Tilburg, 2012), chapter 2. A Masonic tradition of ‘Christian-Zionism’ that Noam Chomsky (a Jewish agnostic) claimed to have exerted a very significant influence upon the historical evolution of British Commonwealth and American foreign policy may well have inspired the expression of such anti-Catholic attitudes, based on a literal and Arian (or non-Trinitarian) idea of Christianity whereby, as in Judaism, no mediator (such as the paraclete of the ‘Holy Spirit’) can exist between the individual and God. David V. Barrett, A brief history of secret societies (London, 2007).

30 Bjorn Lomborg, The sceptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world (Cambridge, 2001).

31 See, for instance, the latest development of Coalition 2030 For Sustainable Development. In common with most other countries, Ireland has never actually succeeded in meeting this target. Helen O’Neill, ‘The evolution of Ireland’s foreign aid’.

32 Sinead Walsh, Oliver Johnson, Getting to zero: a doctor and a diplomat on the Ebola frontline (London, 2018). Irish missionaries were formerly prevalent in such activities, as was partly documented by Werner Herzog’s 1969 documentary The flying doctors of East Africa and Radharc.

33 Valerie Cummins, ‘Opportunity in the face of adversity: the potential role of the military in contributing to Ireland’s economic recovery with a focus on the Irish naval service’, Defence Forces review (2011), 7–12.

34 Paul Collier, Wars, guns and votes: democracy in dangerous places (London, 2005); Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, democracy and terrorism (London, 2007), 32–4, 64–71, 155–67; Anthony Giddens, Europe in the global age (London, 2007).

35 This is a central theme to Owen McGee, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 2015).

36 Peter Sutherland, ‘Lessons and reasons’, in Paul Sweeney (ed.), Ireland’s economic success: reasons and lessons (Dublin, 2008), 14–25 (quotes pp. 21, 24).

37 Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining terror: how experts invented “terrorism” (Cambridge, 2013).

38 Andrew Heywood, Political theory (3rd ed., London, 2004), 116–19 (quote p. 117). American expressions of this viewpoint can be witnessed in journals such as Survival and the Naval War College review. For a fresh debate on this theme, see Global Society, vol. 34, no. 1 (2020).

39 Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe: a thousand years of conflict and cooperation (London, 2016).

40 J.W. Young, Britain and European unity 1945–99 (2nd ed. London, 2000), 143–8, 160–4; Anthony Giddens, Europe in the global age (London, 2007), 199–230; Tim Marshall, Prisoners of geography (London, 2015).

41 F.H. Hinsley, Power and the pursuit of peace: theory and practice in the history of relations between states (Cambridge, 1963). Quentin Skinner has recently given international lectures on this theme that can be seen on YouTube.

42 Chris Brown, Kirsten Ainley, Understanding international relations (3rd ed., London, 2015). For a fresh debate on this theme, see Global Society, vol. 34, no. 1 (2020). The premise of European thought in such matters was not actually political liberalism but rather the interrelationship between natural law theory and codified human rights. Von Geusau, European unification, 243–59.

43 Brian Cowen, ‘Challenges to liberal internationalism’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 12 (2001), 1–5.

44 Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacob, Lynn Hunt, Telling the truth about history (New York, 1994).

45 Michael H. Hunt, The American ascendancy (North Carolina, 2007), 322–4.

46 Garret FitzGerald, ‘Civic and Irish republicanism’, in Ireland in the world: further reflections (Dublin, 2005); Mary Jones (ed.), The Republic (Cork, 2005); Iseult Honohan (ed.), Republicanism in Ireland: confronting theories and traditions (Manchester, 2008); Michael D. Higgins, Renewing the republic (Dublin, 2011).

47 Norman Porter (ed.), The republican ideal (Belfast, 1998); Fearghal McGarry (ed.), Republicanism in modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003); Brian Jenkins, The Fenian problem: insurgency and terrorism in a liberal state 1858–1874 (Liverpool, 2008); Fearghal McGarry, James McConnel (ed.), The black hand of republicanism (Dublin, 2009); David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Terror in Ireland (Dublin, 2012). The Oxford Concise English Dictionary introduced ‘an advocate of a united Ireland’ into its definition of the noun ‘republican’ in 1995. Della Thompson (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th ed., Oxford, 1995), p. 1168.

48 Brian Cowen, ‘Challenges to liberal internationalism’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 12 (2001), 1–5.

49 Michael Kennedy, ‘The Irish Free State and the League of Nations, 1922–32: the wider implications’, Irish studies in international affairs (1992), 15, 22.

50 M. Kennedy, D. McMahon (eds), Obligations and responsibilities: Ireland and the United Nations (Dublin, 2005).

51 Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, democracy and terrorism (London, 2007), 32–4, 64–71, 155–67.

52 Roger Altman, ‘The fall and rise of the west: why America and Europe will emerge stronger from the financial crisis’, Foreign affairs, vol. 92 (2013), 8–13.

53 M. Kennedy, D. McMahon (eds), Obligations and responsibilities, 362–83; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Global Island (Dublin, 2015), 36.

54 Brian Doolan, Principles of Irish law (6th edition, Dublin, 2003), 63–5 (quote p. 64), 78–85.

55 Charles Flanagan, ‘Identity and values in Irish foreign policy’, Irish studies in international affairs (2016), 1–5 (quote); Simon Coveney, ‘Address to UN General Assembly, 28 Sep. 2018’, at www.twitter.com/dfatirl (quote).

56 Noel Dorr, ‘Ireland in an interdependent world: foreign policy since 1973’, in B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), quote p. 56.

57 J.T. Checkel, ‘International institutions and socialisation in Europe’, International Organization, vol. 59, no. 4 (autumn 2005), 801–26; John Hume, ‘A personal view’, in J. Dooge, R. Barrington (eds), A vital national interest: Ireland in Europe 1973–1998 (Dublin, 1999), 327–33.

58 Since 1937, the Gaelic language has been the official ‘first language’ of Ireland. Fearing absorption into an Anglo-American world, de Valera judged occasionally that, in the future, ‘our national distinctiveness will depend on the [Gaelic] language more than on any other factor for its continued assertion’. Documents on Irish foreign policy, vol. 6, no. 78. Gaelic language media in Ireland was both commercialised and internationalised for the first time during the 1990s but it did not have a large audience, evoking only a small and passive interest in countries like Scotland and the United States. More recently, efforts have been made to promote the teaching of the Irish language in north American and European universities ‘to provide a platform on which the Irish language can be accessed and showcased as an international language’. Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 42.

59 Owen McGee, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 2015), quote p. 104.

60 J.B. Morton, The New Ireland (London, 1938), quote p. 97.

61 Michael D. Higgins has cited appreciatively the crusade of American ideologue Noam Chomsky against the depoliticising influence of religion by arguing that to separate notions of personal liberties from political liberties is a ‘profoundly reactionary’ idea that must be counteracted at all sections of society. Michael D. Higgins, ‘The personal is political and the political is personal’, in M.D. Higgins, Causes for concern (Dublin, 2007), quote p. 58.

62 Dermot Keogh, Andrew McCarthy, The making of the Irish constitution 1937 (Cork, 2007).

63 F.A. von Geusau, European unification into the twenty-first century (Tilburg, 2012), 243–59.

64 Ibid., chapter 3.

65 Dan Senor, Saul Singer, Start-up nation: the story of Israel’s economic miracle (New York, 2009), 170, 229–30. Funding for research and development purposes in Ireland was carried out almost exclusively by multinational rather than national businesses.

66 Interview with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Bloomberg Politics Online, 16 Mar. 2018; IDA Ireland, Local impact: how foreign direct investment is shaping Ireland (Dublin, 2018), 26–7.

67 Brian Fitzgerald, ‘Ireland – an islander’s perspective’, Defence Forces review (2016), 196.

68 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 65–6.

69 Ibid., 48–9.

70 Tom MacGinty, The Irish navy (Tralee, 1995). A couple of small Irish shipping companies, such as Arklow Shipping (established 1966), have established business links with the Netherlands.

71 E.B. Kapstein, ‘Between power and purpose: central bankers and the politics of regulatory convergence’, International organization, vol. 46, no. 1 (winter 1992), 265–87, especially p. 274.

72 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ireland in Germany: a wider and deeper footprint (Berlin, 2018), 12. Imports of ‘services’ from Germany was quite probably larger, but no figure was given.

73 In 2018, Ireland reportedly enjoyed a positive balance of trade in goods with the United States that effectively balanced out America’s positive balance of trade in services with Ireland. Interview with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Bloomberg Politics Online, 16 Mar. 2018.

74 Canadian banking investments in Ireland have been estimated at 9 billion euros, while Irish banking investments in Canada have been approximately half this figure. Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 32.

75 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 34; Interview with Tánaiste Simon Coveney, Bloomberg Markets and Finance Online, 11 Mar. 2018.

76 Sean Kelly, Fine Gael/European People’s Party 2017 Summer Newsletter, p. 11.

77 John Bradley, ‘The Irish-Northern Irish economic relationship, the Belfast Agreement, UK devolution and the EU’, Ethnopolitics, vol. 17, no. 3 (2018), 268–72.

78 Dáithí O’Ceallaigh, Paul Gillespie (eds), Britain and Europe: the endgame – an Irish perspective (Dublin, 2015), chapter 11.

79 Interview with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Bloomberg Politics Online, 16 Mar. 2018.

80 Details of such schemes can be found in Info, the quarterly magazine of CEB (the Council of the European Development Bank), and Horizons of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. For their political significance, see Mark Leonard, J. Pisani-Ferry, E. Ribokova, J. Sharipo, G. Wolff, ‘Security Europe’s economic sovereignty’, Survival, vol .61, no. 5 (2019), 75–98.

81 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 36, 38.

82 J. Dooge, R. Barrington (eds), A vital national interest (Dublin, 1999), 260.

83 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland, 33, 36, 39.

84 Ibid., 11, 17 (quote), 24–7.

85 Malcolm Chalmers, UK foreign and security relations after Brexit (London, 2017), 1.

86 Benoit Silve, ‘From leadership to partnership: a new American security strategy for Europe’, Naval War College review, vol. 50, no. 1 (winter 1997), 88–103. Silve was a commander in the French Navy.

87 Martin Murphy, ‘Sea power: does Europe still get it?’, Naval War College review, vol. 72, no. 1 (winter 2019), 157–9.

88 Angus Ross, Review of ‘A tale of two navies’, Naval War College review, vol. 71, no. 1 (winter 2018), 168–9.

89 This had paralleled the strategy of Europe’s common agricultural policy in creating an international free market in agricultural produce to assist in the future development of WTO rules for food.

90 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s strategy for the US and Canada 2019-2025 (Dublin, 2019).

91 G.T. Dempsey, ‘Review of Eunan O’Halpin Defending Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 126 (Nov. 2000), 296 (quote); Ronan Fanning, ‘Small states, large neighbours: Ireland and the United Kingdom’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 9 (1998), 127–9.

92 J.P. Duggan, A history of the Irish army (Dublin, 1991).

93 Noel Dorr, Sunningdale: the search for peace in Northern Ireland (Dublin, 2017), chapter 9: ‘How policy is formed’.

94 Garret FitzGerald, All in a life: an autobiography (Dublin, 1991), quote p. 224.

95 Garret FitzGerald, ‘The 1974-5 threat of a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 17 (2006), 141–50.

96 Joe Maxwell, P.J. Cummins, The Irish air corps: an illustrated guide (Antrim, 2009).

97 B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 182–3, 227–34.

98 http://web.archive.org/web/20101126082516/http://military.ie/army/equipment/weapons/weapons.htm.

99 Pat Cox, From economic crisis to political crisis in the European Union? (Lausanne, 2015), 10–11, 16–17, 26, 39–43, 50.

100 J.W. Young, Britain and European unity 1945–1999 (2nd ed., London, 2000), 196–9; Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe (London, 2016).

101 Dáithí O’Ceallaigh, Paul Gillespie (eds), Britain and Europe: the endgame – an Irish perspective (Dublin, 2015), 13.

102 Kevin O’Rourke, A short history of Brexit (London, 2019), 185–6, 188, 214–15, 222.

103 Mark Leonard, J. Pisani-Ferry, E. Ribokova, J. Sharipo, G. Wolff, ‘Security Europe’s economic sovereignty’, Survival, vol. 61, no. 5 (2019), 75–98.

104 https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news18_e/ddgra_18dec18_e.htm.

105 Interview with Taoiseach Enda Kenny by Bloomberg Markets and Finance, 18 Oct. 2017 (available on YouTube).

106 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 4.

107 Matthew Carr, Fortress Europe: inside the war against immigration (London, 2012), part one: ‘Hard borders’. Since 2015 the Syrian conflict has grown even more controversial due to Russian military intervention.

108 Practical sources of division were very differing attitudes towards Turkey as well the possibility of the EU Council of Ministers assuming a more authoritarian approach, akin to what was originally envisioned by deGaulle. Von Geusau, European unification, 197–200, 272–7, 283–8.

109 Imelda Maher, The common travel area: more than just travel (Royal Irish Academy and British Academy, 2018), 3–4.

110 Pat Cox, Europe after Brexit (Lausanne, 2016), 9–11, 17–18.

111 Her Majesty’s Government, Northern Ireland and Ireland: position paper (London, 2016), 21, 27.

112 In the year after its ‘Brexit’ vote, Britain concentrated on strengthen its trading links with Ireland and this saw total trade between the two countries rise from £22.7 billion (Her Majesty’s Government, Northern Ireland and Ireland: position paper (London, 2016), 13) to £55.8 billion (What trade deals has Britain done so far?’, bbc.com/news/uk-47213842), making Ireland Britain’s sixth-biggest trading partner and a country with which it has maintained a very positive balance of trade. Within a year, this rose from an advantage of £4 billion to over £12 billion. This may be due primarily to British firms relocating to Ireland in order to have better access to the European market. Frank Barry, ‘Ireland and the changing global FDI landscape’, Administration, vol. 69, no. 3 (2019), 104-107. Ireland has since decided to appoint a former UK treasury official to the position of the next governor of the Central Bank of Ireland while total trade between the two countries has reportedly risen as high as 70 billion euro (£61 billion), indicating an active promotion of interdependence between the two countries.

113 Dáithí O’Ceallaigh, Paul Gillespie (eds), Britain and Europe: the endgame – an Irish perspective (Dublin, 2015), chapter 11.

114 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Statement of strategy 2017–2020 (Dublin, 2017), 4; Tony Connelly, Brexit and Ireland (2nd ed., London, 2018), 70, 82, 343. Ireland has also declared a willingness to make the ‘common travel area’ a purely bilateral agreement with Britain in Irish law for the first time. https://www.diplomat.ie/tanaiste-signs-agreement-with-uk-on-common-travel-area/.

115 Pat Cox, Europe after Brexit (Lausanne, 2016), 17–18.

116 John Bradley, ‘The Irish-Northern Irish economic relationship, the Belfast Agreement, UK devolution and the EU’, Ethnopolitics, vol. 17, no. 3 (2018), 263–75; Katy Hayward, M.C. Murphy, ‘The EU’s influence in the peace process and agreement in Northern Ireland in the light of Brexit’, Ethnopolitics, vol. 17, no. 3 (2018), 276–91.

117 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Global Island, 13, 27 (quotes); B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 115.

118 John Bradley, ‘The Irish-Northern Irish economic relationship, the Belfast Agreement, UK devolution and the EU’, Ethnopolitics, vol. 17, no. 3 (2018), 268–72.

119 Her Majesty’s Government, Northern Ireland and Ireland: position paper (London, 2016), 13.

120 D. Hearne, A. De Ruyter, H. Davies, ‘The Commonwealth’, Contemporary Social Science, vol. 14, no. 2 (2019), 342; Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe (London, 2016), 148, 177, 184, 186.

121 Jennifer Todd, ‘From identity politics to identity change: exogenous shocks, constitutional moments and the impact of Brexit on the island of Ireland’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 28 (2017), 57–72.

122 Although The Irish Times was always the Dublin journal with the highest percentage of foreign correspondents, most of these writers actually came from Northern Ireland. Terence Brown, The Irish Times: 150 years of influence (London, 2015).

123 J.W. O’Hagan (ed.), The economy of Ireland: policy and performance of a European region (8th ed., Dublin, 2000), 43–4.

124 John O’Hagan, ‘The Irish economy 1973–2016’, in T. Bartlett (ed.), Cambridge history of Ireland (Cambridge, 2017), 508, 512–15, 522. The principal employers in Ireland were in construction, retail, accommodation services, public administration, health, education, transport and financial services.

125 Institute of International and European Affairs, Emerging voices: a future of Europe anthology (Dublin, 2019), 95–112. In recent times, it has been estimated that about one-seventh of Ireland’s workforce were born outside the country while 70 per cent of the 250,000 Irish who emigrated after 2008 were in their twenties.

126 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Global Island, 13.

127 In 2011, the United Kingdom had 260 posts abroad in 145 countries while Ireland had 80 posts abroad, which attempted to represent Ireland in 178 countries. R. Wong, C. Hill (eds), National and European foreign policies (London, 2011), 85; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Global Island.

128 B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds), Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012), 221–2, 238–40. Since 1981 Ireland has been involved in the ‘Vienna Group of Ten’ for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and since 1998 in a ‘New Agenda Coalition’ for the same purpose.

129 Sarah Lain, The future of post-Brexit Germany-UK security relations (London, 2016); Malcolm Chalmers, UK foreign and security relations after Brexit (London, 2017).

130 Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe (London, 2016), 215–18.

131 Richard Higgott, Elke Boers, ‘Rhythms of soft power influence and transatlantic higher education relations’, European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 24 (2019), 119–36, especially pp. 126, 135. The next two most influential powers in terms of higher education have been rated as America and France.

132 Imelda Maher, The common travel area: more than just travel (Royal Irish Academy and British Academy, 2018), 3–4; Royal Irish Academy, Research and higher education on the island of Ireland after Brexit (Dublin, 2017).

133 Dublin City University, Brexit report (Dublin, 2018), 42–3.

134 See, for instance, the list of speakers at the IIEA between 2010 and 2015 in D. O Ceallaigh, P. Gillespie (eds), Britain and Europe: an endgame (Dublin, 2015), appendix.

135 Tony Connelly, Brexit and Ireland (2nd ed., London, 2018), quoted p. 343.

136 David O’Sullivan, ‘Foreword’, European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 24 (special issue 2019), 1.

137 Elizabeth McKillen, ‘Ethnicity, class and Wilsonian internationalism reconsidered: the Mexican-American and Irish-American left and US foreign relations 1914-1922’, Diplomatic history, vol. 25 (fall 2001), 553–87.

138 Tim Marshall, Prisoners of geography (London, 2015).

139 John Walsh, The globalist (London, 2019).

140 D.H. Akenson, The United States and Ireland (Harvard, 1973), 4.

141 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 5.

142 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Global Irish: Ireland’s diaspora policy (Dublin, 2015), 43–4.

143 Government of Ireland, Global Ireland: Ireland’s global footprint to 2025 (Dublin, 2018), 4.

144 Institute of International and European Affairs, Emerging voices: a future of Europe anthology (Dublin, 2019), 51–63.

145 Daniel Keohane, EU military cooperation and national defence (Washington, 2018).

146 Thierry Tardy, Gustav Lindstrom (eds), The EU and NATO: the essential partners (Luxembourg, 2019).

147 F.A. Von Geusau, Cultural diplomacy: waging war by other means? (Tilburg, 2009).

148 Ben Tonra, ‘Security, defence and neutrality: the Irish dilemma’, in B. Tonra, M. Kennedy, J. Doyle, N. Dorr (eds) Irish foreign policy (Dublin, 2012).

149 R.P. Barton, Modern diplomacy (London, 2013), 3.

150 Frans Alting von Geusau, Neither justice nor order: reflections on the state of the law of nations (Tilburg, 2014).

151 Joseph Nye, ‘Soft power’, Foreign policy, no. 80 (autumn 1990); Joseph Nye, Robert Keohane, ‘Transnational relations and world politics’, International organization, vol. 25, no. 3 (1971), 721–48.

152 Joseph Nye, ‘The information revolution and soft power’, Current history, vol. 113 (2014), 19–22.

153 Brian Cowen, ‘Annual John Hume lecture: Clarity, Courage, Change’, in Joe Mulholland (ed.), Why not? Building a better Ireland (Dublin, 2003), 25–32; Brian Cowen, ‘New world order?’, Irish studies in international affairs, vol. 15 (2004), 3–12; Mark Callanan (ed.), Foundations of an ever closer union, 239 (quoting Irish foreign minister Brian Cowen).