(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Wednesday’s dinner between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was always going to be awkward. With 71 days left until the Oct. 31 Brexit deadline, no amount of Riesling can smooth the fact that Britain and Europe are miles away from agreeing on a plan that would allow for an orderly exit.
Their main difference, as ever, is on how to guarantee an open border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. Johnson hasn’t just toughened the U.K.’s position on this issue to bolster his own domestic electoral ambitions; he has announced a hard pivot that will have profound implications for Britain’s future EU trade negotiations, its relationship with Ireland – and potentially the U.S., too.
The new prime minister has turned the EU’s entire argument for the backstop on its head. Dublin and Brussels have maintained that the insurance policy is necessary to honor the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence. The issue has dominated the negotiations - much to the fury of ardent Brexiters. Once Theresa May accepted that the GFA entailed a frictionless border, the backstop became inevitable. When she couldn’t get the EU to put a time limit on it and then failed to sell the idea to parliament, her government fell.
Johnson now rejects that entire logic. He argues the backstop is a threat to the GFA because, he claims, it undermines the “carefully negotiated balance” between communities in Northern Ireland. The agreement “neither depends upon nor requires a particular customs or regulatory regime,” he wrote in a letter on Monday to European Council President Donald Tusk.
This point of view is largely founded on arguments put forward by Paul Bew, an adviser to former unionist leader David Trimble. Bew has argued that the EU weaponized the Good Friday Agreement, inserting itself into matters reserved for the signatories to the document. That, he says, not only diminishes British authority but also subverts the agreement by creating a “top-down” process where the GFA had given the parties control through “bottom-up” consent. Ireland, Bew warns, has been allowed to peddle a “false narrative” that must be challenged. Johnson seems intent on doing just that.
Nowhere in the Good Friday Agreement does it say you can’t have customs infrastructure between Northern Ireland and Ireland. The only mention of the border is in respect to “as early a return as possible to normal security arrangements” and “the removal of security installations.” Bew argues that the peace process enabled the frictionless border, but the real game-changer was the introduction of the EU’s single market in 1992, which removed the customs posts.
Of course, that hardly inspires comfort. Britain intends to leave the single market and the customs union. Claiming the GFA doesn’t directly specify a frictionless border ignores the fact that the agreement was underpinned by EU membership and the single market.
While it’s not in the letter of the agreement, anything that interrupts the flow of trade and people across the border has been widely viewed as contrary to its spirit. Katy Hayward, a researcher at Queen’s University Belfast who has written authoritatively on the border issue, disputes Bew’s interpretation. She argues it underplays the role of the U.K. government in implementing the backstop and exaggerates the role of the EU. It’s also hard to dismiss the many warnings that effectively repartitioning Ireland will lead to violence and threaten the achievements of the past two decades.
Bew says any backstop (for the sake of economic relief) should be temporary, but his broader argument suggests the matter should remain up to Ireland and the U.K. to adjudicate. Johnson’s letter fudges this point. He offers to make a “legally binding commitment” not to put in place “infrastructure, checks or controls at the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.” In other words, he is rejecting the logic of the backstop while essentially offering something that looks a lot like one.
The real question is if not the backstop, then what? A study from the Alternative Arrangements Commission, supported by Brexiters, suggests there are ways to eliminate border controls for goods – but these would take time to implement, involve checks away from the border, and impose costs on businesses. And no reliable mechanism has been found for implementing the plant and animal checks required by EU law.
One of the “creative solutions” Johnson may float – according to a report by the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn – is that Brussels should allow Ireland to depart from EU rules so it can align itself with Northern Ireland (and the U.K.) to keep the border open. The reaction in Dublin must have been unprintable – but it’s the kind of idea that would delight a great many Brexit voters furious at little Ireland’s outsized role in the negotiations.
Whether or not Johnson is able to reach a deal with the EU, both sides will have to return to the negotiating table later. Trade between the two is too important, and as a raft of leaked documents on Sunday made abundantly clear, even the government’s own estimates show that a hard Brexit will be costly and disruptive.
When those talks happen, the EU will set out the same preconditions it made during the exit negotiations. By rejecting the idea that peace in Northern Ireland requires a backstop, Johnson is hoping to remove a major moral argument from the EU’s arsenal.
It may well backfire. Johnson’s reinterpretation of the GFA will be closely watched not just in Dublin but in Washington, where Democratic leaders in Congress have repeatedly warned that any threat to the peace process would put a U.S.-U.K. trade deal in jeopardy. Donald Trump will no doubt reassure Johnson at the G-7 summit on Thursday that he will have his trade deal; but it’s not the president’s to give.
Still, with a potential early election looming, optics are everything now. There can be no doubting Johnson’s determination to see Britain leave the EU at the end of October; his political future, and that of his party, are nailed to that mast. He may try to convince Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that Europe will suffer economically from a no-deal Brexit more now than it might have when growth was stronger. But it’s difficult to see how the EU can meet Johnson’s demands without accepting his reinterpretation of the GFA, or his implicit request that the bloc simply trust Britain to work out the details later. Neither seems likely.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.
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