neutrality

neutrality has been an element, implicit or explicit, in Irish foreign policy since the foundation of the state. Between the First and Second World Wars intimations of neutrality as national policy were evident in the Irish positions at the League of Nations where, in the 1930s, Eamon de Valera was an insistent advocate of collective security as an alternative to great power‐led alliance systems.

The Second World War saw the transformation of this diplomatic tendency into a legal status. Although neutrality was the favoured stance of the greater number of small powers at the beginning of the war, Ireland could gloss this self‐preservatory pragmatism with moral principle in view both of its pre‐war diplomacy at the league and of the continuing issue of partition. However, while the formal requirements of neutrality were strictly adhered to throughout the conflict, Ireland's position was rather less than equidistant between the belligerents and, in effect, favoured the allies. This form of neutrality, a degree short of ‘benevolent’ but some distance from the rigour of, for example, the Swiss or Portuguese approaches, seemed to commend itself to public opinion, especially after the entry of the United States to the war.

Nevertheless, the simple fact of its non‐belligerence left Ireland in some disfavour with the western allies in the atmosphere of the immediate post‐war years. Diplomatic isolation at this time was not eased by the continuation of neutrality into the Cold War era. The rejection of NATO membership in 1949 by the first interparty government on ‘constitutional’ grounds failed in its evident purpose of eliciting American support for the anti‐partitionist cause. Consequently, for the first half of the 1950s, Ireland was forced to maintain an uncomfortable foreign policy stance in which fiercely pro‐western ideological affinities were complemented, on grounds bewildering to many abroad, by a refusal to participate in the western alliance.

From the later 1950s, however, neutrality found a more comprehensible diplomatic expression. The combination of United Nations membership in 1955 and the return of Fianna Fáil to power in 1957 gave rise to a reassertion of the international activism of the 1930s. Ireland emerged as a considerable ‘middle power’ player in UN diplomacy. Positions were taken which were frequently at odds with ‘western’ interests on issues such as the representation of China at the UN and nuclear disengagement in Europe.

The question of neutrality featured prominently in the national debates over entry to Europe in the 1960s (see european union). In the event, however, the status of sole neutral in the Community posed no great difficulties. Similarly, Ireland was able to navigate its way through the final, tense phase of global bipolarity in the 1980s with its declaratory commitment to neutrality intact. At the end of 1999 the Irish government signed up to NATO's ‘Partnership for Peace’ programme, which was originally designed to provide the former communist states of eastern Europe with a half‐way house to full membership. Official assurances that this would not affect Ireland's traditional neutrality were questionable—but they remained largely unquestioned in a diplomatic environment in which the stance had ceased to have much meaning.

Bibliography

Fisk, R. , In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality (1983)
Keatinge, P. , A Singular Stance: Irish Neutrality in the 1980s (1983)
Salmon, T. , Unneutral Ireland: An Ambivalent and Unique Security Policy (1989)

Norrie MacQueen