Neutrality

Irish neutrality is one of the most misunderstood features of Irish foreign policy. It has been elevated into a sacred doctrine by its most avid domestic supporters and simultaneously criticized by pro-Western analysts in Europe and North America, especially as it was practiced during World War II and the Cold War. The reality is subtler than these diametrically opposed interpretations would suggest. Irish neutrality, for starters, is not legally based: It is enshrined neither in domestic law nor in international treaties and substantially departs, therefore, from the Swiss model. Instead, it has been a strategic and tactical tool that Irish political leaders have, depending on the circumstances, utilized in the pursuit of Irish national interests. The Irish electorate has consistently backed government officials and policymakers in how they have wielded neutrality. It has, accordingly, proved to be an essential component of Irish statecraft.

WORLD WAR I

Neutrality was actually mooted as a foreign-policy option even before Ireland gained independence. On the eve of World War I, Roger Casement envisioned Ireland being transformed into "a neutralised, independent European state under international guarantees." During the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Arthur Griffith asserted that "Ireland would want to be free to be neutral in the event of war declared by Britain." Future Irish leaders agreed. As storm clouds gathered on the European horizon during the 1930s, Eamon de Valera, taoiseach (Irish prime minister) and minister for foreign affairs, initially entrusted hopes for international peace to the League of Nations and collective security. But when the League failed to enforce sanctions against Japan for its invasion of Manchuria, and Italy for its aggression against Ethiopia, de Valera, wishing to sidestep a debilitating conflict that might do irreparable material and political harm to the new, nearly defenseless Irish state, made a crucial geostrategic decision: In any future war involving the great powers Ireland would, he insisted, "be neutral."

WORLD WAR II

De Valera transformed this diplomatic preference into a realistic alternative by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938, which, inter alia, returned to Ireland the "treaty ports" of Cobh, Lough Swilly, and Berehaven, which had remained under British military control since 1922. On 2 September 1939, the day after World War II began, de Valera declared Ireland's neutrality, introduced the necessary legislation into Dáil Éireann and instructed the Department of External Affairs to notify all the belligerents in the conflict. The Irish government soon came under tremendous pressure to jettison neutrality from the United Kingdom, which feared, especially early in the war, that Nazi Germany might use Ireland as a staging ground for an invasion of the British mainland. The promise of a British commitment to a united Ireland in exchange for joining the Allies was even dangled before de Valera. He refused the offer. Across the Atlantic, neutrality strained relations between the Irish and American governments. In April 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was doing all he could to support Great Britain's war effort, brusquely dismissed a request by Frank Aiken, minister for the coordination of defensive measures, to sway the British in favor of Irish unity. The American envoy in Dublin, David Gray, developed a particular disdain for Irish neutrality and tried to undermine it by utilizing his direct family connections to President Roosevelt.

Yet the American representative, like so many commentators since then, overlooked a critical dimension of Irish neutrality during the war: It was a powerful manifestation, only two decades since achieving independence, of Irish sovereignty. Ronan Fanning has noted that neutrality was conceived "not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end: the means whereby the end of sovereignty might be freely expressed in the form of an independent foreign policy—a policy independent, above all, of British policy." F. S. L. Lyons has defined neutrality as "the ultimate expression of Irish independence." Indeed, this aspect of it may partially account for de Valera's decision at the end of the war, for which he has rightly been excoriated, to pay his condolences at the German embassy in Dublin upon learning of the death of Adolf Hitler. It certainly accounts for de Valera's famous reply to a passage in Winston Churchill's May 1945 victory speech that was highly critical of Irish neutrality: "Even as a partitioned small nation, [Ireland] shall go on to play our part in the world, continuing unswervingly to work for the cause of true freedom and for peace and understanding between all nations."

The tendency of some Irish proponents of neutrality to transform de Valera's quasi-idealistic public interpretation into smug self-righteousness has been tempered by scholarship of the 1990s that has conclusively demonstrated how Irish neutrality in practice was heavily tilted in favor of the Allies during World War II. Irish officials shared intelligence and planning information with their Allied counterparts, granted overflight rights to Allied aircraft, and returned downed Allied pilots to their respective authorities. Indeed, when the United States entered the war, de Valera said "We can only be a friendly neutral." This high level of official cooperation, combined with the support of thousands of Irish men who joined the British army, outweighed the pro-Nazi sympathies of hard-core Irish republicans like Sean Russell and Frank Ryan, who collaborated with German agents in Ireland and across Europe during the conflict.

THE COLD WAR

Neutrality remained a feature of Irish foreign policy throughout the Cold War. It became entwined with Northern Ireland in 1949 when the first interparty government turned down an invitation to join NATO on the grounds that while Ireland remained partitioned, it could not be a member of a military alliance that included the United Kingdom. This policy was championed by Seán MacBride, Irish minister for external affairs and leader of the junior member of the coalition, the staunchly republican party Clann na Poblachta. A former Irish diplomat has argued; however, that a majority government led by Fine Gael (the senior partner in the interparty government) would have brought Ireland into NATO. Party politics thus became a component of the postwar debate over neutrality.

The Irish government differentiated between economic and military alliances, and, ironically, when the United Kingdom applied for membership in the European Economic Community in 1962, Ireland did likewise. During the application process, the taoiseach, Seán Lemass, repeatedly stressed Ireland's pro-Western credentials and the narrow limits of neutrality in the context of the Cold War: its absence from NATO did "not mean that we are indifferent to the great issues which divide mankind today, much less that we are neutral in regard to them." Indeed, "while Ireland did not accede to the North Atlantic Treaty, we have always agreed with the general aims of that Treaty." Neutrality, therefore, could be tactically downgraded in favor of economic or other interests as the government determined. Ireland did not join the European Economic Community until 1973, but in the interim its neutral status qualified it for numerous United Nations peacekeeping missions. Still, throughout the Cold War, Ireland, unlike many other neutral countries that participated in peacekeeping operations, was neither "neutralist" nor a member of the Third World-dominated nonaligned movement. It is best compared during this period to other European neutrals such as Sweden, Finland, and Austria.

In the post–Cold War era neutrality has remained a strategic and tactical option for the Irish government. Ireland permitted Allied aircraft to refuel at Shannon airport during the Persian Gulf War in 1990 to 1991 since the war was sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, but it did not send troops to the region. In 1999, Ireland became one of the last European nations to join NATO's Partnership for Peace. The government stipulated that it will participate only in Partnership for Peace humanitarian and peacekeeping operations authorized by the United Nations Security Council, and within this framework it has contributed troops to NATO-led, UN-approved missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Some Irish politicians have recently called for full membership in NATO.

The Irish government is committed to the European Union's emerging Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). It has concluded that humanitarian and rescue operations, peacekeeping missions, and crisis management efforts (the Petersberg Tasks), some of which will be conducted by the European Union's developing Rapid Reaction Force (RRF), pose no threat in principle to Ireland's military neutrality. Irish forces will participate only in European missions authorized by the UN and on a case-by-case basis. The Irish government has stressed that the CFSP and the RRF do not constitute a mutual-defense commitment. Yet growing popular apprehension that they do indeed pose a threat to neutrality, support for which has always been quite resilient among some sectors of the Irish electorate, contributed to the defeat of the Nice Treaty in a referendum in June 2001, even though the treaty is primarily concerned with the reform and enlargement of the European Union's political institutions and not with defense policy per se.

Bibliography

Dwyer, T. Ryle. Strained Relations: Ireland at Peace and the USA at War, 1941–1945. 1988.

Fanning, Ronan. "Irish Neutrality: An Historical Perspective." Irish Studies in International Affairs 1, no. 3 (1982): 27–38.

Fisk, Robert. In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster, and the Price of Neutrality, 1939–1945. 1983.

Keatinge, Patrick. European Security: Ireland's Choices. 1996.

Keogh, Dermot. Twentieth-Century Ireland. 1994.

Lee, Joseph. Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society. 1989.

O'Halpin, Eunan. Defending Ireland: The Irish State and Its Enemies since 1922. 1999.

Salmon, Trevor. Unneutral Ireland. 1989.

Joseph M. Skelly

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