Throughout the UK’s period as an EU member, the fact of membership (alongside the Republic of Ireland) played a role in enabling the architecture which supports the Northern Ireland peace process. The 2016 Brexit vote, however, and the ensuing debacle over the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol, challenged economic and political stability in Northern Ireland, and influenced the emergence of contested discussions about the prospects for a united Ireland.

This paper documents how the UK vote to leave the EU influenced calls for constitutional change, and it determines the extent to which the Irish unity narrative has grown and developed since 2016. Part of that narrative has included calls for the EU to begin work to facilitate preparation and planning in the event of a vote in favour of Irish unity. Drawing on interviews with key EU and other national figures, and acknowledging how the EU handles/d constitutional changes and disputes elsewhere (including in Cyprus and Germany), this paper extrapolates how the EU might deal with the prospect of a border poll in Ireland. The evidence suggests that a sensitivity to Northern Ireland’s unique and challenging political circumstances (and to unionists in particular), coupled with a reluctance to encourage secessionist movements, and reservations about the impact on UK-EU relations are among the key reasons why the EU is unlikely to adopt a policy position on Irish unity or to plan or prepare for any specific constitutional outcome in advance of a border poll.

Since the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum, which saw a slim majority of Britons vote to leave the EU, mostly-quantitative political science research has investigated why people voted the way they did. Whilst this burgeoning literature helped to identify patterns in voting behaviour, it has been closely associated with the racialised and exclusionary trope of the ‘left-behind’, leaving us with a limited picture of voting behaviour, in particular, in London. What’s more, the white, ‘male-stream’ nature of social science research more generally has left certain voices, including women, ethnic minorities and migrants (from the EU especially), largely excluded. Through informal conversational interviews and participatory research methods (identity mapping) with 24 individuals, this study aimed to dig deeper into Londoners’ Brexit attitudes, seeking to understand the intersecting roles of social class, race and gender in determining views towards Brexit. As research developed, citizenship came to constitute a key additional determinant of attitudes. Three themes, on which attitudes are based, became clear during inductive analysis: pro-/anti- immigration, disillusionment with politicians, and anxiety and uncertainty. My research contributes empirically by drawing out, in detail, how identity played into Brexit attitudes, based on these three themes. It also makes a conceptual contribution by applying Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘fields’ to a new setting. The work of anti-racist and feminist scholars is used to broaden Bourdieu’s theories to understand how social class, race, gender and citizenship interacted, providing a new theoretical base from which the existing quantitative political science findings might be understood.

Despite a vibrant and growing academic literature on European Union (EU) sponsored cross-border initiatives, remarkably little is known about cooperation between Ireland and Wales, its genesis, and specific programmes that helped to shape it over the years. This article tackles all these questions and, by using the Interreg Ireland-Wales programme as an illustrative example, it investigates the pre-and-post Brexit challenges, successes and failures of substate authorities in actively shape cooperation across the Irish Sea. First, the article examines the critical role played by the EU in providing both the specific financial resources for Ireland-Wales collaboration, and a wider governance framework within which this could develop. Second, it will consider the broader context of the Brexit debates and developments in the United Kingdom (UK), the Republic of Ireland and the EU and their far-reaching consequences on the future of such cooperation. The creation, the geographical dimension, the thematic priorities and the governance mechanisms appear in this context as key achievements brought by the Interreg programme to the Ireland-Wales cross-border region. For the future, the paper will argue for a necessary uphold of the past achievements, in particular in relation to the role of substate networks in representing civil society’s needs in the cross-border territorial context of the Irish Sea.

The 2016 vote by the UK to leave the EU returned to the spotlight two of Britain’s oldest – and interrelated – questions: those of Europe, and (Northern) Ireland. Drawing on material from policy documents, the media, and interviews conducted by the author with key elite actors, this paper will analyse how the “Brexit” referendum was entered into by the Cameron government with a lack of appreciation of the delicate nature of stability in Northern Ireland and its peace process. This includes a misunderstanding of the role that the UK’s EU membership played in post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland and how this would be impacted by a Leave vote. This paper analyses attitudes of the Conservative Party to Northern Ireland and the EU prior to 2016 referendum – including during the Coalition Government and the party’s time in opposition. In doing so, this paper contextualises the ‘blind spot’ of Northern Ireland which became the defining issue of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.