Home thoughts on abroad

In his foundational work on Irish foreign policy - A Place Among the Nations: Issues in Irish Foreign Policy (1978) - Patrick Keatinge identified the three major levels of international affairs likely to affect Irish policy in the following years: the global, the regional (Europe) and what he described asthe "British Isles sub-system", which he saw as characterised by dominance, dependence and inequality.

This volume by academic colleagues and policy practitioners - many of them former students of his - is published to assess his achievement as pioneer of the discipline of international relations in Ireland and to mark his recent retirement from Trinity College, Dublin. It deals with these three levels and most of the themes he identified in that book and its influential predecessor, The Formulation of Irish Foreign Policy (1973): Ireland's search for independence, identity, security, unity and prosperity and the pressing need to understand more about the domestic sources of its foreign policy.

Evident throughout are the particular values Keatinge has brought to bear on the subject - the need to separate theory and analysis from ideology, reality and interests from wishful thinking and above all to explore the actual empirical and historical setting within which foreign policy is framed. His own work on the United Nations, global and regional security, Ireland's neutrality in comparative perspective, political integration in Europe and on British-Irish relations is echoed in the contributions to this volume.

Its editors emphasise how well Keatinge's original mapping of the field has stood up under the impact of events and in subsequent studies. A major difficulty has been the failure of official Ireland to accord foreign policy issues the importance they merit in such an open national political and economic system, drawing on so many points of contact with the world. The stratum of people in universities, business, trade unions, voluntary organisations, artists, writers and journalists with an informed interest in international events remains exceptionally narrow compared to other smaller EU states. There are some exceptions, such as development aid policy, human rights and EU affairs. With justice, Tonra and Ward lament the failure of international relations to develop as an autonomous academic discipline here and the absence of a stand alone national centre for the study of international affairs or Irish foreign policy. This means that operative interests, values - and alternatives - are often insufficiently examined and that policy-making is all too often reactive or defensive.

Ray Murphy and Noel Dorr document Ireland's United Nations role, in articles that add substantially to our knowledge. In an authoritative chapter on UN peacekeeping and Irish defence policy Murphy documents how it has evolved from a largely policing contribution, with roots in the Army's national role, to the more robust commitments undertaken in the last decade. The turning point was Somalia. The Oireachtas gave permission in 1993 for a Chapter VII peace enforcement operation. This set precedents for participation in the ex-Yugoslavia operations and then in NATO-led but UN-mandated ones. He argues that the implications have not been adequately examined in public commentary, despite the difficulties they pose. He is critical of the political and policy contributions made by successive ministers and by the Department of Defence, but acknowledges some recent improvements.

Dorr looks particularly at the so-called "golden age" in Irish UN policy from the time we joined in 1955 to the early 1960s, led by Frank Aiken. Major initiatives included support for decolonisation, Chinese UN membership, nuclear non-proliferation and a prominent Irish role in the Congo. Ireland emerged from international isolation through its UN role and fielded a highly talented team at the General Assembly sessions, which was not afraid to offend the major powers. Dorr pays full tribute to their achievement. But he points out there were special circumstances favouring their work which changed rapidly through the 1960s. They included the effects of decolonisation, which brought a large influx of new African states to the UN, which then made the running on this subject and on apartheid.

Their growing radicalism partly reflected a disenchantment among the major powers with declaratory politics in the General Assembly, making it difficult for the Irish delegation to keep pace. As Dorr makes clear, there was also a growing need to temper courage with prudence and realism in Ireland's UN policy. Sean Lemass as Taoiseach had different objectives than Aiken's, especially in the first application to join the EEC in 1961, making it necessary to be careful how Ireland responded to the Algerian independence struggle or the South Tyrol/Alto-Adige issues so as not to antagonise France and Italy. Dorr concludes with an informed look at Ireland's future UN policy, arguing there remains ample scope for a distinctive contribution, despite greater commitments to coordinate policy through the EU.

Helen O'Neill provides an excellent detailed overview of Ireland's official aid programme. She emphasises its objectives of poverty reduction, participation and partnership and examines how they can be maintained as the programme expands hugely in line with the Government's commitment to reach the UN target of 0.7 per cent of GNP by the end of 2007. Robert Fisk challenges the EU to break ranks with the US in the Middle East by formulating its own policy towards the region. It should be based on a recognition that the Oslo process has failed and recognise Europe's separate interests there as a neighbouring region.

Bill McSweeney contributes a playful chapter on 'International Relations as Poetry', in which he sharply criticises old and new realisms in the discipline for overlooking the possibility of choosing alternatives and "recovering the power of ideals as an agency of change". He pays tribute to Keatinge for grounding his realism in history not natural science and for opposing ideology not ideals in his work. Declan Kiberd and Michael D. Higgins argue in a stimulating joint contribution that it was and is through exile that nationality is born, "given that no people can ever fully define itself from within". The Irish exiles of the 19th century were well aware of the hybrid sources of their own nationalism. On this account cultural creativity in its broadest sense is immensely indebted to the migration of peoples.

The chapters on Europe and Britain overlap in their treatments of these levels in Ireland's foreign policy. Brigid Laffan argues that joint membership of the EU "has transformed relations between Britain and Ireland and assisted them in their continuing search for ways of managing and perhaps resolving the communal conflict in Northern Ireland". The EU functioned as a political arena for the two states, its policies have had a notable effect on the North and it has served as a model of negotiated governance.

Miriam Hederman-O'Brien takes a long view of Ireland's relations with Europe, and how they have affected Irish identity. Martin Mansergh, in a grainy chapter full of insight into recent relations between Britain and Ireland, argues that Britain "no longer overshadows Ireland to anything like the extent it did, even long after independence", for which the EU is in good part responsible.

Tony Brown concludes the volume with an instructive look at the efforts to found a foreign policy institute here. Plans drawn up in the 1970s foundered on the issue of public financing. The Royal Irish Academy's International Affairs committee has done valuable if less ambitious work. The Institute of European Affairs, in which Patrick Keatinge has been centrally involved, has completed a successful decade, based largely on corporate and departmental membership. That still leaves Ireland unique, as Brown puts it, "in its almost total failure to provide significant funding for public policy research" - despite the impact of globalisation, environmental concerns, migration, regional crises and other international issues which will affect us.

Paul Gillespie is Foreign Policy Editor of The Irish Times

Ireland in International Affairs, Interests, Institutions and Identities. Edited by Ben Tonra and Eilís Ward. Institute of Public Administration, 218 pp. €35