European Union

In January 1972 the Taoiseach Jack Lynch and his foreign minister Dr. Patrick Hillery left Dublin airport for Luxembourg to sign Ireland's Treaty of Accession to the European Communities. Just over fifty years after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which gave the people of twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland the right to establish a state (the Irish Free State) separate from the United Kingdom, an Irish government negotiated membership of a community that had altered the nature of statehood in Europe. Ireland as a relatively young state was preparing to pool and share its sovereignty with the other member states of the Union in a dynamic political experiment. The Irish government made its first application for European Union (EU) membership on 31 July 1961. It took twelve years to bring this key foreign-policy goal to fruition, largely because of events beyond the control of any Irish government. Throughout the 1960s successive governments remained wedded to Ireland's eventual membership of the Union. In 1972, 83 percent of those who voted in the referendum voted in favor of membership.

THE NICE NO

Ireland's engagement with the EU system was relatively smooth until the shock of the defeat of the Nice referendum in June 2001. Ireland was the only member state that had to submit the Nice Treaty to a popular referendum for constitutional reasons. In Ireland this was the fifth referendum on the EU since 1972. All of the others had been passed by a comfortable, albeit declining, majority. On 7 June 2001 the Irish electorate voted no to the Nice Treaty by 54 to 46 percent in an extremely low voter turnout of just 35 percent. The outcome of the referendum was a major reversal for the government that had negotiated the treaty, for the main opposition parties that had advocated a yes vote, and for the peak groups in civil society, notably the main business associations, farming organizations, and the Trade Union Congress. Although a second referendum in October 2002 reversed this decision by a decisive 62 to 38 percent, Irish attitudes toward the EU have since entered a more complex and a more ambivalent phase.

IRELAND'S POLICY INTERESTS

There is remarkable consistency in the policies that are accorded a high priority by Ireland in the EU. Preferences were molded by Ireland's low level of development relative to the continental European economies, by sustained high levels of unemployment, and by Ireland's dependence on mobile foreign investment. The aim was to try to ensure that Ireland could accommodate developments in social and economic policy at the EU level. From an Irish perspective, the key policy areas were as follows:

•The EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) enabled Irish agriculture to escape from the traditional cheap-food policies of the United Kingdom. The emphasis in relation to the CAP is to maintain or improve farm incomes. Ireland and France remain the key supporters of CAP.
•Cohesion policies at the EU level assist Europe's peripheral areas in catching up. Successive Irish governments deployed considerable diplomatic effort to ensure that the EU would develop a cohesion policy and that Ireland would benefit from financial transfers from the EU budget. Following reform of the structural funds in 1988, Ireland experienced a significant increase in financial transfers from the EU budget. Given Ireland's high level of economic growth in the 1990s, the volume of transfers will be reduced progressively until 2006.
•Successive Irish governments attempted to protect the domestic space by carefully vetting policies and EU regulations that were likely to have an impact on Ireland's competitive position and on regulatory frameworks at the national level. The internal-market program was thus accorded a high priority because of the weight of EC legislation and the need to prepare Irish industry and the service sector for the competitive shock of the 1992 program. Irish administrations have been adamantly opposed to any harmonization of taxation policy in Europe and have fought a hard campaign to maintain low levels of corporation tax.
•The 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) marked further integration, with provisions on a single currency, the common foreign and security policy, and cooperation among EU members on justice and home affairs. Rather than dislodging the high-ranking policies of the past, the TEU simply added priorities and concerns. Irish governments in the 1990s showed considerable commitment to the public debt philosophy and targets set out in the Maastricht Treaty and supported the full observance of the Maastricht criteria across Europe. In practice the Irish political and policy system was converted to the sound-money/tight-budget philosophy of the German Bundesbank.

Successive Irish governments have endorsed EU social and environmental regulation, provided that regulations do not impose an undue burden on Irish industry or the exchequer. The goal of maintaining Ireland's attractiveness to foreign mobile investment, particularly American capital, runs deeply through Irish policy. In promoting domestic preferences and protecting national space, Irish politicians and administrators have had to engage in coalition-building with like-minded states. Unlike other small states, such as the Nordic or the Benelux countries, Ireland does not have a natural grouping of like-minded states and thus must seek allies on a case-by-case basis: with the French on agriculture, the United Kingdom on taxation, and the other "cohesion countries" on regional funds.

Domestic adaptation to the challenge of competition and Ireland's vulnerability as a small open economy caused difficulties. Irish adjustment in the 1970s, notwithstanding the oil crises, was relatively smooth. However, by the end of the 1970s Ireland had entered a vicious circle of economic policy. Ireland had the worst economic performance in Europe during most of the 1980s as a result of international recession, which was reinforced by dramatic domestic efforts to reduce public-finance and balance-of-payments deficits and to lower inflation. By the mid-1980s Ireland's economic and social strategy was in ruins and its hope of prospering in the EU was in considerable doubt. There was a widespread sense of Ireland's failure, not unlike the prevailing mood in the 1950s. The state and its society found itself at another critical juncture. Ireland had to find the institutional and cultural capacity to overcome the failure of the 1980s. Without this, the opportunities offered by the internal European market and the deepening of integration would have been lost. Tight management of the domestic budget and a new system of social partnership meant that Ireland could take advantage of the larger market. The conditions for the remarkable boom of the 1990s were in place.

REPOSITIONING IRELAND IN THE EU

Just over thirty years of membership of the Union and over forty years since the Irish state altered its strategy of economic development, Ireland finds itself as a small, prosperous Western European state with per capita incomes that have converged with those of other wealthy EU states. The claim that Ireland is a "nation caught on the hop between the traditional and the modern, between the Bishop of Rome and the Treaty of Rome" no longer holds (Eagleton 1999, p. 177). The economic modernization represented by the Treaty of Rome has prevailed. Within the EU, Ireland will find itself as one of over twenty five small states in the decades ahead. It is no longer regarded as a deserving, small, poor state. Policy preferences are likely to change when Ireland becomes a net contributor to the EU budget Irish officials will be expected to contribute more actively to EU debates rather than concentrate on the key issues of interest to Ireland. How Ireland repositions itself in the EU system depends on the outcome of several proposed developments. The draft EU constitution, agreed by the Convention on the Future of Europe, is the subject of negotiations among the member states and represents an important development in the dynamic of European integration. The purpose of the draft constitution is to simplify the EU's constitutional and institutional framework and to add to its legitimacy by inserting a charter on rights. Major changes are foreseen in the institutional architecture and decision-making processes. In a Union of twenty-five, it will be more difficult for Ireland to have its voice heard. Managing its relations with the EU will demand greater prioritization and care from Irish governments and policy-makers. While it is highly improbable that a common European defense policy will emerge in the near future, any moves in that direction would present major difficulties for a neutral Ireland.

Bibliography

Dooge, Jim, and Ruth Barrington, eds. A Vital National Interest: Ireland in Europe, 1973–1998. 1999.

Eagleton, Terry. The Truth about the Irish. 1999.

Laffan, Brigid, R. O'Donnell, and M. Smith. Europe's Experimental Union: Re-thinking Integration. 1999.

Maher, Denis. The Tortuous Path: The Course of Ireland's Entry into the EEC, 1947–73. 1986.

Brigid Laffan

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