As European leaders met in Salzburg, the University’s Professor Feargal Cochrane, a conflict analysis specialist, says the signs for agreement over the border in Northern Ireland are ‘ominous’.
‘The downbeat assessment of Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on his way into dinner at the Salzburg summit yesterday was “I don’t think we’re any closer to a withdrawal agreement than we were in March. I can’t report any progress at this stage unfortunately”.
‘This was an undiplomatic rebuke of Theresa May’s government’s position and an ominous signal as the Brexit negotiations enter their final stages. Given how little time is left, how far apart the parties remain over the key sticking points and how much needs to be done between now and November, the fear that the negotiations would fail simply by running out of time is now a real and present danger.
‘It is true that both sides want a deal, but while there have been recent shifts in tone there is still stalemate over the substance. While Michel Barnier offered an olive branch to Theresa May in commenting that the border needed to be de-dramatised and was prepared to reduce the operational difficulties over border checks on goods in some significant areas, the EU still appears to be maintaining the requirement for a legally enforceable backstop to avoid a hard border in Ireland after Brexit.
‘The effort to de-dramatise the Irish border issue is a sensible aim, but despite some spin in the UK media over recent days that Michel Barnier had blinked and the EU would improve its offer on the Irish border, this was mainly an effort on the EU side to find more palatable language for the UK.
‘The EU is suggesting a border between GB and Northern Ireland which the DUP has rejected and unsurprisingly, given her reliance on the DUP for her political survival at Westminster Theresa May has also rejected it.
‘If a no-deal car crash is to be avoided, which all parties to the negotiations desperately want, significant movement is now required by one side or the other. It is still possible that this will happen but time is short and we are getting to the point of best and final offers.
‘The UK’s negotiating position now seems to amount to Chequers or bust and the Prime Minister is using her domestic weakness as a way of saying that it is simply impossible for her to deliver anything other than the Chequers deal. While there is certainly a grain of truth in this, it is a risky negotiating position to take.
‘It gives her very little wiggle room and allows her political fate to be determined by those on the other side of the negotiation. An additional point is worth making about negotiations more broadly, namely that chronically weak leaders who cannot command their own domestic political context often find it difficult to secure negotiated deals.
‘The reason for this is that those on the other side of the table lack confidence that any deals made will be honoured. (Michael Gove did little to dissuade people of this view in his media interviews last weekend). It would be even money, at best, whether Theresa May could get the current iteration of Chequers through Westminster as it is.
‘The UK has conducted a masterclass in how not to negotiate. It went in hard at the beginning, with “no deal is better than a bad deal”, then split apart over conflict visions of what was wanted from the negotiations, then experienced inertia and stasis with little return of the EU serve on the key issues.
“I was told recently by an informed source that at the beginning of the negotiations each member state would be asked about its view on the Irish border problem and while Dublin may have been a key voice in the discussion, it was still only one among 27 other voices. Now apparently, they just turn to Dublin looking for a thumbs up or thumbs down and the other member-states take their lead from that.
‘The UK has been an asset in this sense for the Irish negotiating position, aided and abetted by the interventions of the European Research Group and by the regular contributions of Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, all of whom have demonstrated why a legally binding backstop is so essential for Ireland. It is ironic that despite the UK’s rich tradition of Rolls Royce diplomacy over countries that it sought to control during the years of Empire, has been so unable to practice these skills in defence of its own political future.
‘Theresa May said back at the beginning of the negotiations that what she wanted was a ‘red white and blue Brexit’. She may well get her wish, but this risks not having a deal to go with it and crashing out of the EU with potentially disastrous consequences.
‘If the worst happens, then at least the Prime Minister will have a better answer than I ran through fields of wheat the next time she is asked about the naughtiest thing she had ever done.’
Professor Feargal Cochrane
Feargal Cochrane is vice chair of the Political Studies Association and professor of International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent. He is director of the Conflict Analysis Research Centre and deputy head of the School of Politics and International Relations at Kent. His current research is examining the impact of Brexit on the peace process in Northern Ireland and its devolved institutions.
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