Neutrality concept retains potency, yet is ambiguous

IRELAND and Finland, where I spent last weekend, have a good deal in common

IRELAND and Finland, where I spent last weekend, have a good deal in common. Each has had to live with, and for a period under, a large neighbour - in Finland's case this happened twice, with two neighbours!

Each of us in different ways had a 19th century experience of parliamentary democracy - Finland through its own autonomous parliamentary system within the Russian Empire, and Ireland through participation in the Westminster Parliament of the British Empire. Each of us had to fight a civil war immediately after securing independence. And in recent times each of us has experienced a major self-inflicted economic crisis - Ireland at the start of the 1980s and Finland at the start of the 1990s.

There has, however, been at least one major difference in our historical experiences, in relation to our currencies. Ireland retained the imperial currency for about 60 years after independence; Finland established its own currency 60 years before independence. Paradoxically, both these decisions had the same motivation - a concern that the currency be stable - which the rouble was not in 1860, and sterling at least seemed to be in 1922.

Finally, both Ireland and Finland have been "neutral" states a term which has as many different meanings as states so describing themselves.

READ MORE

In Finland's case neutrality was a way of reassuring, and thus keeping at arms length, its Soviet neighbour. Once the threat from that quarter receded with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland, while retaining its policy of abstention from military alliances, seems to have stopped describing itself as "neutral", presumably because there are no longer two sides as between which to be neutral!

In Ireland, however, the concept of neutrality has retained some of its public potency, while becoming even more ambiguous than it was in the past.

Thus, during the last war we described ourselves as neutral in the hope of deterring the Germans from attacking us. In fact we were non-combatant but in no way neutral - we extended a range of facilities to our British neighbour to help Britain defeat the Nazi menace to our freedom.

No less than 14 forms of secret Irish aid to Britain were set out in a February, 1945, memorandum to the British cabinet. These included allowing Irish nationals to join the British forces; provision for Irish forces to be placed under British command in the event of a German invasion; an overflying corridor for aircraft from Northern Ireland; immediate transmission to Britain of all Irish information on aircraft or submarines off the Irish coast and of meteorological information; providing facilities for direction-finding and radar; releasing Allied personnel who landed in Ireland while continuing to intern Germans until after the war; and close cooperation with Allied intelligence services.

We were non-combatant simply because we weren't attacked. And to minimise the danger of such an attack by Germany, we kept our assistance to Britain secret, pretending, quite successfully, to be neutral.

Again, our non-adherence to the North Atlantic Alliance in the late 1940s had nothing to do with neutrality. In 1948, our strongly anti-communist government was more than willing - indeed anxious to join the Alliance. But its foreign minister Sean MacBride, who had been chief of staff of the IRA a dozen years earlier, made the naive mistake of thinking that Britain and the US needed us so badly that our neighbour would hand over Northern Ireland against the will of a majority there to secure our participation in NATO. This was a delusion - but having publicly raised the stakes to this level, our government found itself unable credibly to apply for membership.

Upset at the failure to join the Alliance, Sean MacBride, in the words of the US ambassador, subsequently "volunteered to make an all-out effort to secure bipartisan support for a bilateral treaty of defence" with the US. But the US turned down this proposal because "such an arrangement would be in conflict with the concept of collective defence of the North Atlantic area. . . it would derogate from the principles underlying the North Atlantic Treaty and would invite increased pressure from other countries which are not included in the regional defence plans or systems".

Our subsequent non-participation in Atlantic defence was thus not sought by us, but was forced on us against our wishes as a result of MacBride's initial blunder. So to describe Ireland as having chosen "neutrality" in the Cold War would, to say the least, be somewhat misleading!

Attitudes to neutrality in lreland today remain fairly confused, and on the issue of common European defence opinions seem to be fairly evenly divided. The recent MRBI poll on this issue, which has been widely misunderstood, shows 20 per cent in favour of changing neutrality policy, while 18 per cent are for maintaining a neutrality policy but agreeing to a common EU foreign and defence policy. At the same time, 43 per cent are for maintaining a neutrality policy and not agreeing to common EU foreign and defence policy, and there are 19 per cent Don't Knows re neutrality and a common EU foreign and defence policy.

It is clear from this that, for a significant proportion of Irish people, neutrality does knot preclude involvement in a common foreign and defence policy. Indeed, for many people "neutrality" does not seem to be so much an operational issue as a general sentiment favouring certain enduring values in foreign affairs such as opposition to irresponsible arms sales and to nuclear weapons, together with doubts about the use of force to protect economic interests in other continents. (This latter might, however, be subject to some re-thinking if we found ourselves suddenly deprived of oil supplies because a country like Iraq had successfully invaded its principal oil-rich neighbours!)

With the ending of the Cold War many in Ireland as in Finland recognise that there are no longer antagonists between which they can be neutral. But in this new and unfamiliar situation many here have yet to be convinced of the desirability of an Irish military commitment that would go beyond traditional UN peace-keeping.

So far as we are concerned, nothing beyond that seems to be currently proposed or even contemplated - apart, that is, from a possibility of future involvement in UN peace-enforcement of the kind currently being successfully undertaken in Bosnia by Ifor.

At present, we have no military involvement in Ifor, although the highly successful policing element of Ifor is under Irish command.

BUT we have to consider seriously, and fairly urgently, whether we wish to stand out as the only European state remaining outside the Partnership for Peace - a project that now involves almost every north Eurasian state from Kirghizstan to Portugal and from Finland to Greece - for even that most neutral of all neutral states, Switzerland, is now contemplating joining this partnership.

In terms of working for peace in practical ways, especially through the sponsorship of joint actions by countries that have traditionally been hostile to each other, or between which territorial or minority disputes exist, nothing as positive as this partnership has ever been attempted before; for Ireland to cold-shoulder it would be to dishonour our commitment to peace and to make us look fools, and ignorant fools at that, in the eyes of the rest of the world.

But that subject deserves a separate article of its own!