What does ‘EU special status’ mean? It means whatever you need it to mean.
Of the EU’s 28 member states, 19 have special status regions, each enjoying a bewildering array of exemptions and privileges.
This already appears to offer a precedent for anything - including regional special status for a non-member state. Everyone in Northern Cyprus, for example, can become an EU citizen by applying for a Greek Cypriot passport.
Brussels has developed two classifications for special regions beyond the European continent, depending upon their degree of autonomy - but this is like specifying the bend in the legendary banana. In reality, there is wide variation even within these two classes, while the numerous special regions inside Europe have defied categorisation altogether.
Formally grouping whatever regions it can classify and keeping quiet about the rest reveals what Brussels needs from the concept of ‘special status’.
It needs to pretend the EU is a club of rules, laws and fundamental principles rather than a ‘Europe a la carte’ - a phrase uttered in horror in Brussels precisely because it is true.
The very term ‘special status’ implies something far more systematised than cobbling together one unique deal at a time, which is what has usually happened.
So when Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator, spoke to the Financial Times this week about “special status for Northern Ireland” he was merely stating the obvious.
Nobody wants a hard border, including everyone who will decide Brexit’s outcome. That means there will be a unique deal for Northern Ireland, which must then be proclaimed a special status region to maintain the fiction of immutable EU rules.
Arguably, Northern Ireland has always been a European special status region.
One of the EU’s most basic rules is that member states must respect each other’s territorial integrity. So the UK and Ireland should not have been able to join what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, without Ireland first repealing its constitutional claim on the north.
Instead, the UK and Ireland filed a joint application while saying nothing about their little local difficulty, while Brussels politely looked the other way.
Northern Ireland thus attained the special status of undisputed disputed territory.
This was resolved by the Good Friday Agreement, which removed the constitutional claim, yet formalised its main effect by recognising Irish citizenship north of the border.
Brussels now asserts that it helped to deliver the agreement. This is nonsense but that has not stopped it making us ‘special’ in EU eyes again. The fact that we were carefully not seen as special when we were, and are now retrospectively seen as special in a way we are not, only further illustrates how wonderfully flexible Brussels can be.
The smart thing for any political party to do is to capitalise on that flexibility, or more exactly to capitalise on its inevitable flexibility.
If special status is going to happen, and mean whatever it needs to mean in order to happen, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by presenting it as your idea.
The SDLP was the first party in Northern Ireland to propose special status after the EU referendum, although the extent of its cunning on this is debatable.
Sinn Féin initially portrayed special status as a trap, falling short of Brexit’s scope to agitate for a united Ireland. However, from October last year it commenced a U-turn and now claims to lead on the issue - although it still says Northern Ireland should remain “inside the EU”, which at best would require a creative interpretation of ‘inside’.
Sinn Féin must still be hugely ambivalent about special status - it cannot want an EU deal that makes Brexit’s aggravating potential go away. However, as republicans have no control over this, they might as well appear to own it. If the deal does not serve Sinn Féin’s purposes the party can always say it was not the kind of special status it wanted - because special status can mean anything.
The only parties who have not grasped any of this are, predictably, the unionist parties. The DUP and UUP have both rejected special status as a trap to distinguish Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.
That ship sailed long ago - Northern Ireland has been distinct since its creation. EU special status is coming and unionists have their own list of things they need it to mean. If they have any sense, they will stake a claim on it.
newton@irishnews.com