Is a No Deal” Brexit Still Avoidable? Why the Irish Border Remains a Stumbling Block for Negotiations

W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s comic history of England, 1066 and All That, talks about nineteenth-century British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s efforts to solve the Irish Question—the puzzle of what to do with rebellious Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom. According to Sellar and Yeatman, every time that Gladstone got close to an answer the Irish changed the question. Over the last couple of days, a new Irish question has stymied Brexit negotiations between the United Kingdom and the EU: how to deal with the border between the Republic of Ireland, which

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

Ireland’s Cold War

The end of the Cold War didn’t have obvious consequences for everyday life in Ireland. The great battle with communism seemed irrelevant to a country that had only gently been brushed by the forces of industrialized capitalism and affected a threadbare neutrality in international politics. Farming was the thing, even if it had gradually become ...
Read Article
Academic Article

Constructing the International Foundations of E-Commerce: The EU-US Safe Harbor Arrangement

Much recent international relations scholarship has argued that states are unable to control e-commerce, so that private actors are coming to play a dominant role. However, this body of literature fails to account for emerging “hybrid institutions,” in which states create general frameworks of rules, which are then implemented by private actors. This article examines ...
Read Article