Brexit was a strategy for cutting loose from what its advocates regarded as the constraints of EU membership, a panacea for those hostile to what they regarded as constrained national sovereignty. It was a hubristic vision that ignored the complex interdependencies of contemporary globality that constrain national agency, especially for smaller and medium-sized states. The protracted withdrawal negotiations that followed the 2016 Brexit referendum exposed these fallacies.

Amongst the most critical of the unanticipated consequences of the ‘hard Brexit’ pursued by the British government was the impact on the border arrangements and management of the island of Ireland, the only place where the EU and its former member state share a land frontier. It is a problematic border because it is fraught with historical memories, Moreover, this conflict was only relatively recently pacified by the Belfast Agreement (1998), of which the EU acted as a major guarantor. The signing of this agreement led to a historic but nevertheless fragile peace, brokered between the two culturally entrenched communities in Northern Ireland. In these circumstances, what Brexiteers had confidently predicted as a straightforward withdrawal turned out to be anything but, because Brexit threatened to destabilise the peace process.

This paper examines the role the Irish border issue played in the fraught withdrawal process: that is, its consequences both for the Brexit that eventually transpired and for the peace process, and no less significantly, for the future relations between the UK its erstwhile EU partners.