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Two years and a half. It is the time that has elapsed since the United Kingdom approved the Agreement to Withdraw from the European Union. In its orders to the European Commission, the British Government —weakened by the ‘partygate’— now intends to revive tensions with the EU by throwing the Irish safeguard of the Brexit Agreement to the ground. Boris Johnson he seeks to unilaterally modify the Protocol that he himself signed and that he considered a great negotiating success. This would imply endangering the Good Friday Agreements of 1998 and to re-establish a physical border on the island of Ireland after nearly twenty-five years of peace. However, according to some analysts, the intention of the British president is to exert pressure as a political tool to distract from other types of internal problems, even if this implies the escalation of another conflict with the EU by presenting the Protocol as an attack on its sovereignty. .
“Establishing a border again in Ireland will lead to violence and conflict. It means going back forty years in time in terms of peace on the island », he explains to ABC Enrique Feas, main researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute. The primary stumbling block in the Brexit negotiations was to avoid at all costs erecting a new physical border between the two Irelands that would violate the Belfast Good Friday Agreements of 1998. To do this, it was agreed to move the border to the Irish Sea. As the idea was to minimize controls, the ideal formula was the controversial Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, which entered into force in January 2021 (with the disapproval of the unionists of the DUP).
Sponsored from the outset by the British Government (after the Brexit Agreement that led to the resignation of Theresa May, Boris Johnson opted for a safeguard that would not affect the whole of the United Kingdom, but only Northern Ireland), the EU, Northern Ireland and the US, the objective was to guarantee, at least, the existence of a customs union between the UK and the EU. It was then created a kind of fiction in which Northern Ireland was part of the EU single market which Johnson now wants to break. “The United Kingdom has always tried to place the responsibility of controlling its border on the European Union and has insisted on not complying with its part of the Protocol,” says Feás.
Permanent tug of war
After the signing of the Withdrawal Agreement (with the Protocol on Ireland), the Cooperation and Trade Agreement to implement a minimum commercial integration between the EU and the United Kingdom. A free trade agreement involving border controls. Johnson, who publicly promised the DUP unionists the opposite of what was signed, denied that these controls would finally be implemented, having to face the riots of unionist groups (April 2021), who felt betrayed. Despite the flexibility of the Commission in minimizing controls, the United Kingdom sought to renegotiate the Protocol so as not to be subject to the supervision of the Court of Justice of the EU. “At no time has the British Government concerned itself with facilitating the business of companies; it is a pure matter of principle to generate political excitement. It is demanding from the EU the only thing that it knows it cannot give it: to break the principle of the single market and to renounce the CJEU as the ultimate interpreter of community legislation”, affirms this expert.
In the middle of all this “permanent tug of war”, United Kingdom announced the controversial Law of the Internal Market under the excuse of avoiding barriers between the British regions. Now, London has returned to the old ways maneuvering to once again grant power to the ministers with which (with the excuse of simplifying the internal trade of the United Kingdom) to skip the mandatory controls in the Irish Sea. To this must be added the recent elections in Northern Ireland in which, for the first time since the division of the island a century ago (1921), the pIrish nationalist party of Sinn Féin, supporter of the union of the two Irelands. The difficulty stems from the clause in the Protocol which establishes that, if there are strong indications that Northern Ireland wants to reunify with Ireland, the British Government is obliged to call a unification referendum. It is early to talk about it, but everything is beginning to move: «What was an unlikely thing a few years ago, no longer seems so impossible. Even though it’s far away.”
trade war
Background, The United States has assumed the role of main guarantor compliance with the Good Friday Agreements of 1998 ahead of the British. Johnson’s idea has always been this: leave the EU and have control of its borders, but not allow the same to others. In addition to accepting only the international agreements that suit you. “If the problem was really to make life easier for companies and minimize controls, there would be other ways to minimize them and the Commission has been willing to favor it on several occasions,” he says. Enrique Feas.
If the Protocol is suspended, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement becomes wet paper because it is based on an exit agreement that must also be respected. The United Kingdom would become involved in a trade war with catastrophic consequences for all of Europe and for strategic sectors such as the automotive industry.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism