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When the UK voted yes to Brexit, they forgot a minor detail. This minor detail \u2013 Ireland \u2013 will, as journalist and intellectual Fintan O\u2019Toole explained, make negotiating any kind of Brexit at best an impossibility.<\/p>\nWhen the UK voted yes to Brexit, they forgot a minor detail. This minor detail \u2013 Ireland \u2013 will, as journalist and intellectual Fintan O\u2019Toole explained, make negotiating any kind of Brexit at best an impossibility.<\/p>\n
A long-time, award-winning columnist with the Irish Times, O\u2019Toole presented a lecture at Munich\u2019s Globe Business College on 19 January that approached the political phenomenon of Brexit from a historical and uniquely geographical viewpoint. Looking over from Ireland \u2013 a perilously close former colony of Great Britain, its closest neighbour across the Irish Sea \u2013 the prospect of Brexit appears absurd and dangerous to peace and stability \u2013 an own goal for a chimeric concept of Britishness.<\/p>\n
The campaign for Brexit has been driven by a \u201cvisceral English nationalism\u201d, O\u2019Toole asserts. And it\u2019s unusual, as the \u201cEnglish USP\u201d is moderation and stability:<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t do revolutions\u201d. Their one revolution was \u201cGlorious\u201d because it was \u201cbloodless\u201d, and they didn\u2019t have a socialist or fascist revolution in 20th<\/sup> century as so many of their European neighbours did. So this nationalism is poorly articulated, which made it much easier to grow without much attention.<\/p>\n One of the things a concept of nationalism needs is an oppressor, some kind of threat from outside, in order to engender fear, which in turn binds people together and strengthens its fabulous narrative. Because, as O\u2019Toole states, \u201cthe basic problem of nationalism is that nations are ambiguous and fluid entities, a people held together by a common misconception of their origin\u201d. A geographic unit of people that used to be the hub and chosen of an empire still retain an identity as an imperial power. Witness the \u201cbrilliant comedian and performance artist called Jacob Rees-Mogg\u201d \u2013 a Eurosceptic conservative British member of parliament \u2013 who cites Agincourt, Cr\u00e9cy and Waterloo \u2013 all historical battlefields where the English won a resounding victory. But recalling old military successes from the Napoleonic wars of the 19th<\/sup> century \u2013 never mind the Hundred Years War of the 14th<\/sup> and 15th<\/sup> centuries \u2013 has embarrassingly little to do with the reality of the United Kingdom of the 21st<\/sup> century and its global position.<\/p>\n This \u201cvisceral\u201d nationalism is na\u00efve, claims O\u2019Toole, especially as compared with the more tempered version across the Irish Sea. Irish nationalism is more \u201ccivilised\u201d because \u201cwe\u2019ve done the other bit\u201d and have experienced the troubles \u2013 and the Troubles \u2013 it spawns. The importance of a realistic, inclusive vision of a nation is reflected in the Good Friday Agreement, achieved 20 years ago, in April 1998. The brilliance of the Good Friday Agreement,\u201d explains O\u2019Toole, \u201cis not \u2018what would you die for\u2019 but \u2018what could you live with?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Brexit has put everything that the Good Friday Agreement sought to allay back on the table. \u201cWhat Northern Ireland really needed was 20 years of absolute boredom,\u201d O\u2019Toole says. Resting on EU law and regulation, the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland is an inner-EU border, which can be crossed without notice. And this intractable, insoluble issue has inserted itself into the centre of negotiations. There can\u2019t be a hard border in Ireland. \u201cThe British establishment know it\u2019s not doable, so they let [the issue] drift.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, during the first round of talks, the negotiators ended up scrambling to paste over once again this huge rift in the logic of Brexit. The term they finally came up with was \u201cfull regulatory alignment\u201d. O\u2019Toole appealed to any mathematicians in the audience. As far as he was aware, if A = B and B = C, then A must equal C. Applied to the circumstances surrounding Brexit, he surmised, \u201cIreland has regulatory alignment with Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland has regulatory agreement with the UK. But Ireland also has regulatory agreement with the EU. So the UK also has to have regulatory alignment with the EU.\u201d In other words, he says, it\u2019s not going to work.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what I think is going to happen,\u201d O\u2019Toole explains. Brexit will go into the second phase of trade talks and they\u2019ll realise that no deal can be made in the designated time. Instead, the negotiators will agree a temporary treaty to carry them further into a longer limbo. The UK can achieve a kind of unattainable dream of Brexit but with full regulatory alignment. \u201cThis leaves us with a fundamental question: is it worth it?\u201d O\u2019Toole asks. \u201cI think not. Somebody has to stand up and say, \u2018You know, self harm is not a national policy\u201d.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Award-winning journalist Fintan O’Toole speaks about the impossibility of Brexit and why nationalism is naive When the UK voted yes to Brexit, they forgot a minor detail. This minor detail \u2013 Ireland \u2013 will, as journalist and intellectual Fintan O\u2019Toole explained, make negotiating any kind of Brexit at best an impossibility. A long-time, award-winning columnist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christine-madden.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}