Last Word: Brexit’s Border Problems
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Katy Hayward |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905818779335 |
40 POLITICAL INSIGHT • JUNE 2018
Speaking at an event in Derry/
Londonderry immediately prior to
the referendum on EU withdrawal,
then Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland, Theresa Villiers, dismissed claims that
Brexit would lead to a hard Irish border. ‘The
reality is,’ she claimed, ‘that there has never
been a genuinely “hard border” enforced
between the UK and Ireland, and there
would not be one if we leave’. The fact it had
been just a decade since the last military
watchtowers overlooking the contested
boundary line were dismantled did not
modify her impression of the Irish border as
being indefatigably open.
But it was memories of these
watchtowers, along with the cratered lanes,
the blown-up bridges, the army checkpoints
and the ‘dragon’s teeth’ roadblocks that soon
came to the fore when the implications of
the referendum result were digested. For
those living and working in and around
the Irish border, there is a deep connection
between people’s anxieties about the future
post-Brexit border and the border of the
Troubles, as our recent Bordering on Brexit
project found.
‘Nobody wants a return to the borders of
the past’, Theresa May assured the people of
Northern Ireland. What fullling that promise
means in practice, however, has been the
subject of intense debate among politicians
and head-scratching among civil servants
in London, Dublin, Belfast and Brussels ever
since. Is it to be a ‘frictionless border’ or ‘as
seamless and frictionless as possible’?
Brussels’ calls for both sides to be ‘exible
and imaginative’ towards Northern Ireland
after Brexit arises from a bold ambition to
make an external frontier of the EU one of
the most open borders in the world. This
quest is most striking because it comes at a
time when the rally-cry to ‘take back control
of our borders’ is far from an exclusively
British one.
Borders are hardening around the
European Union and within it. This is only
to some extent a result of the increased
securitisation of the EU – a process
that relies on tighter coordination and
information-sharing between its member-
states. (The news that UK citizens would
have to receive ETIAS authorisation to enter
the Schengen zone after Brexit exemplies
this practice.)
For the most part, though, eorts to
prevent the illegal entry of people and
goods into national territory have been on
the initiative of individual states. In addition
to the ‘temporary’ but regularly renewed
opt-out from the Schengen rules preventing
internal border controls, it is increasingly
common to see European states building
physical barriers to secure their territories
against illegal movement of people and
goods.
Hungary is surrounded by no fewer than
seven countries. It began building its rst
border fence in June 2015, when migrants
coming from Serbia faced a four metre
high barrier along the 175 kilometre border.
This merely deected the ow of migrants
to come via the new EU member-state of
Croatia instead, which soon prompted the
construction of a razor-wire fence along
that border too. Apparently, scarecrows
have been used to boost the impression of
a well-manned boundary line along its 348
kilometre length.
Other techniques were used on the
Hungarian border with Slovakia (gravel-lled
mesh-and-lining containers, as used by
the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq),
Romania and Slovenia. Indeed, Slovenia’s
borders with Hungary, Croatia and Austria
were all secured by ‘technical’ means in 2015.
This trend is present not just towards the
south and east of Europe. Norway is in the
process of installing CCTV cameras on all
passable roads along its lengthy border with
Sweden in an eort to reduce smuggling.
And Denmark recently announced that it
was building a 70 kilometre fence along
its boundary with Germany to prevent the
spread of swine u through roaming wild
boars. Threats to ‘national integrity’ can
come from the most unlikely of sources, it
seems.
Technological solutions and physical
infrastructure are typically as much to do
with reassuring citizens and dissuading
would-be immigrants and smugglers, as
actually preventing cross-border movement.
The challenge of the post-Brexit Irish
border is that – unlike in Hungary or
Denmark or Norway – nobody on either
side, for any reason, wants to see it become
a barrier to movement once more. There is
no appetite for ‘friction’. Arlene Foster and
Martin McGuinness, as then First and Deputy
First Minister, jointly asserted: ‘the border
must not become an impediment to the
movement of people, goods and services’.
This is why the ‘Irish border issue’ is
pivotal to the Brexit negotiations – the UK
seeks to preserve the openness of a border,
whilst extricating itself from the rules and
arrangements that enable it to be quite so
open.
Contemporary Europe shows that hard
borders are not anathema to EU states nor
are they automatically antithetical to the EU
‘project’.
States can operate alone to build barriers.
But it takes transnational agreement and
cooperation to make them unnecessary.
Katy Hayward is a Reader in Sociology at
Queen's University Belfast.
Last Word
Brexit’s Border Problems
Katy Hayward reflects on the issues raised by the Irish
border, and the rise of border politics across Europe.
Political Insight June 2018 NEW.indd 40 02/05/2018 15:40
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