WORLD VIEW:BOSTON, BERLIN - or Birmingham? One of the sure consequences of Ireland's No to Lisbon, if it persists, will be to reposition this State back into a closer relationship with the larger island from whose suffocating embrace we have spent the last 35 years of EU membership trying to escape, writes Paul Gillespie
That real independence was achieved through a more open-minded official nationalism which expanded Ireland's horizons by pooling sovereignty.
In his revealing letter to this newspaper on August 14th Michael Lillis, an official in the Department of Foreign Affairs from 1966-88, described the impact of those years: "The change in 1973 was volcanic. Government ministers, TDs of most parties, trade union leaders and members, entrepreneurs, students, journalists, farm leaders and ordinary farmers, as well as officials like myself, were challenged . . . by the complexities and opportunities of the Community.
"We responded with a refreshing enthusiasm which astonished the [European] Commission and the European Community at large and even ourselves. There was no more asking: What did or what would the British do? Rather: Where is our interest here and what is the way to win?"
This has not been better put. Its impact continued through the 1990s, when greater British-Irish equality and mutual respect within a larger setting helped enormously in pursuing and achieving a Northern Ireland settlement. But it began to falter from 2000 or so, as seen in the Nice I referendum; in how the Boston-Berlin question was posed by neo-liberal politicians, journalists and academics as we entered the euro; and intriguingly in the greater normalisation of British-Irish relations that followed the Belfast Agreement.
Gradually this official Europhile Irish nationalism from the first decades of EU membership, in contrast to the post-imperial British Euroscepticism which provided its continuing Other, lost whatever traction it had with the wider voting public, which in any case remained less enthusiastic and much less well-informed than the political and official elite.
Social and cultural change contributed to this process. Notwithstanding their substantial Irish content, British tabloid and broadsheet titles now occupy some 40 per cent of the print market and maintain the Eurosceptic policy lines decided in London. Television is equally penetrating. Advertising media are indistinguishable, reflecting the explosion of British retail chains here in the credit boom. British football and celebrity media have huge Irish audiences.
Trade and investment both ways are central, especially in the Irish-owned sector of the economy - but at a quarter or a third of the economy, compared to the two thirds-plus in the post-independence decades. Euro membership strains that as sterling's value declines. And the flow of people between the two islands continues strongly.
Another former senior Foreign Affairs official wonders whether the centrifugal forces which propelled Ireland away from British rule and influence during the last century are being replaced in this by the pull of the larger island on the smaller one now that the imperial and post-imperial phases have passed. The Northern settlement contributes to that. So does economic policy and structural convergence; shared credit and property booms; and our mutual membership of the Anglosphere.
But it is ironic that this should be happening just as a more stable Ireland contrasts with a less stable Britain grappling with the possibility of Scottish independence and facing an increasingly inevitable Conservative election victory that could encourage that to happen. Such traumatic changes in their cultural moorings would prompt a profound unionist rethink of where their best interests lie - perhaps in Irish reunification.
Lillis sets out a convincing scenario of how the geopolitical shift between Ireland and Britain could happen. As Ireland decides how to handle the Lisbon No the Conservatives commit themselves to a referendum which would copperfasten the end of the treaty and then to a renegotiation of their relationship with the EU. This would leave the French and Germans determined to go ahead with it in some other way. Inevitably Ireland would be reclassified into the British camp. This would have many unforeseen political and economic consequences, amounting to a loss of Irish independence, since the negotiating terms would be set in London.
Official Europhile nationalism came under parallel pressure North and South. John Hume's influential belief that Europe contained a model for a settlement was displaced by Sinn Féin's insistence on sovereignty and by a similar resurgence of such feeling in the Republic's successive referendum encounters with European integration. Despite Sinn Féin's Anglophobia its attitude to sovereignty and neutrality shares traditional British mindsets.
This week's publication of research on the Lisbon result nevertheless shows Irish opinion far more Europhile than Britain's. More people consider themselves Irish and European than Irish only. There is a willingness to examine a revised treaty, but a marked resistance on the No side to accept that the result has such costs and consequences.
It also reveals a collapse of political authority, with 50 per cent of voters not feeling close to any party and a clear loss of trust in political representation. That probably explains why official Europhile nationalism no longer has a convincing traction with the public. It needs to be reinvented and communicated far more effectively to citizens and voters, if we are not to sleepwalk back into the arms of mother England.