To what extent has EU integration transformed the territorial conflict in Northern Ireland? A post-Brexit referendum re-assessment

As the Irish border question has re-emerged in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum, this article aims at assessing the influence of EU integration on the evolution of the Northern Irish territorial conflict. It argues that European influence has not really transformed the conflict as some, mostly in constructivist circles, have claimed. The first section shows that the post-Brexit context in Northern Ireland reveals two major problems in the constructivist interpretation: the resilience of traditional unitary conceptions of State sovereignty in the UK and the ambiguities of the SDLP's post-nationalist discourse on the need to deterritorialise Irish national identity in the context of European integration. The following sections elaborate on each of these two aspects. The second section shows that even if EU integration partly facilitated a joint Dublin/London approach on the Northern Irish issue, the 2016 referendum reveals that British political elites preferred to risk the long-term destabilisation of Northern Ireland than to make concessions on their unitary and indivisible conceptions of the entire UK as one sovereign State. Regarding the SDLP, the third section demonstrates that in spite of its more Europeanised, post-nationalist and deterritoialised discourse during the Peace Process, the party has remained fundamentally the same: a Northern Irish moderate nationalist party committed to the old territorial objective of Ireland's reunification.