John O'Brennan: Can Ireland's 'ourselves alone' stance still be justified?
Ukrainian soldiers fire a cannon near Bakhmut, an eastern city where fierce battles against Russian forces have been taking place, in the Donetsk region, on Monday, May 15, 2023. Picture: Libkos/AP
Russia’s military assault on Ukraine has precipitated the most significant change in Europe’s security and defence landscape since the Second World War.
Finland recently became the 31st member of Nato. Sweden is highly likely to join within the coming months.
Within days of the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Germany announced plans to increase defence spending by more than €100bn.
Almost alone among European states, Ireland continues to hold to a policy of neutrality that is entirely inconsistent with both our national interests and our obligations to partner states in Europe.
Neutrality has, over decades, acquired idealistic and almost sacral parameters in the minds of those who believe in it. This is a worldview that equates neutrality with being a good and virtuous citizen of the world.
Professor Ben Tonra argues that Irish neutrality is thus linked cognitively to a weird kind of neo-pacifism, ie the notion that the use of military force itself is illegitimate.
Ireland’s posture of ourselves alone comes off as holier than thou — we are emotionally attached to a notion that we are better than other nations, somehow more moral and ethical in the way we conduct ourselves in the world.
Tonra argues that much of our foreign policy exceptionalism is based on the notion of being a good global citizen, and especially on a track record of solid support for international development and an estimable contribution to peacekeeping.
But most European members of Nato do just as much in these fields as Ireland, if not more. So, are those states somehow lacking virtue because of their belonging to a defensive military alliance, while also doing the same ‘good’ work Ireland does globally? Are we really saying that peer partner states in Europe, such as the Netherlands, Spain, or Estonia, are more aggressive or less ethical than we are?
The truth is we have always been the world’s worst hypocrites when it comes to neutrality. We preach about the virtues of being opposed to militarism while benefiting enormously from the US security guarantee of Europe implicit in Article 5 of Nato's founding charter.
Recent revelations support this contention. Since 1952, Ireland has had an agreement with the British air force to patrol our skies. If Nato planes are defending Irish sovereign territory, how can the claim of military neutrality stand up? Repeated Russian manoeuvres in Ireland’s territorial waters suggest Moscow sees us as anything but neutral.
We paint the world in black and white colours and see ourselves always and everywhere as being on the side of the angels.
What does it actually mean when one says “we are not neutral politically but we are militarily non-aligned"?
For me, it means that we are rhetorically attached to the values set out in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (democracy, pluralism, respect for minority rights, and fundamental freedoms) but that our attachment to those values does not go beyond rhetoric. We are entirely unprepared to defend those values if they are threatened by adversarial forces. You can’t be for democracy in theory and not be willing to support it in practice.
Neutrality is a cop-out because it allows us to behave like the ostrich of Europe, to put our heads in the sand and wish away all the negative pathologies that characterise international affairs.
First, we have responsibilities to our EU partner states. We enjoy the luxury of geography. We no longer live next door to an imperial, brutish neighbour.
Many of our fellow EU member states, however, do not have that luxury. They have to share a border with or are located very close to an aggressive, hyper-nationalist, revanchist Russia, which never accepted that many of these states had the right to leave the Russian Empire.
To experience Russia in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania is an entirely different thing than to do so from a distance 2,600km to the west. We need to understand that these are our trusted interlocutors and partners within the EU, the states we work closest with on many policy dossiers of real importance to Ireland.
These states gave us unconditional support during the protracted Brexit negotiations. They never flinched because they understood that the border issue was an existential issue for Ireland.
We now need to understand that their security is existential for them. We cannot just say “Sorry guv. We’ll take your refugees but do nothing beyond that for you” if they were next to feel the force of Putin’s paranoid historical revenge fantasies.
Our 50 years of EU membership have not just been transactional. It implies real responsibilities to our partner states. We have been among the biggest winners from the EU single market, which came into operation 30 years ago. The integration process in Europe has deepened considerably over those three decades.
Ireland is routinely identified as one of the EU states to have benefitted most from the incremental extension and solidification of the single market. Are we really saying that we have no responsibility to defend a market that is the bedrock of our own security and prosperity and that of our partners and friends?
The second responsibility arises from our position as one of the world’s most important communications hubs. The aviation control tower at Shannon Airport handles 90% of all air traffic over the North Atlantic, handling up to 1,500 flights every 24 hours. A hugely disproportionate number of the world’s most important tech, pharma, biopharma, and medtech companies are based in Ireland, engaging daily with global connections on a vast scale.
About 65% of Europe’s communications cables run through Irish waters. Recent manoeuvres of Russian naval vessels in Ireland’s territorial waters have been widely reported.
They underline our position as a weak link in securing critical subsea cables and information flows. Our prosperity depends to a large degree on this connectivity in an economy that has been utterly transformed after 50 years of EU membership and our embrace of globalisation.
Ireland’s external environment has thus changed beyond recognition since the policy of neutrality emerged more than 80 years ago.
It may have made sense in the context of a fragile state still getting on its feet as a major war approached in Europe in the late 1930s: Neutrality then constituted an entirely understandable assertion of self-interest. But the fact that we stayed out of the war still rankles in some European capitals where people know what it means to face down fascist aggression.
And while the belated announcement that defence spending will increase by up to about €1bn by 2028is undoubtedly welcome, as is the announcement of a national consultative forum on international security policy, to take place in late June, the truth is that it will barely bring the country to the point where it can engage in even minimal self-defence, let alone contribute anything meaningful to European defence and security.
For Ireland, the question is whether we continue to duck our responsibilities or face up to our obligations in a rapidly changing international landscape.
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