A Short History of Brexit

Many of the sources cited in A Short History of Brexit, particularly in the later chapters, are freely available on the internet. I am reproducing the book’s endnotes here so that these can be easily accessed by interested readers.

This post lists the notes for chapters up to and including Chapter 7. The notes for Chapters 8-11 and the Envoi are available here.

INTRODUCTION

  1. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), p. 271.
  2. On EMU, see O’Rourke and Taylor (2013), freely available at https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.3.167, as well as numerous blog posts and opinion columns available at http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/ author/korourke/. On the democratic deficit, see O’Rourke (2015), freely available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/criq.12197.

CHAPTER 1: THE ORIGINS OF SUPRANATIONAL EUROPE

  1. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-florence-speech-a-new-era-of-cooperation-and-partnership-between-the-uk-and-the-eu.
  2. NAFTA is due to be replaced by a new United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, similar to the old agreement, but with a much less easily pronounceable name (USMCA).
  3. The text of the treaty is available at https://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/Home/Texts-of-the-Agreement/North-American-Free-Trade-Agreement.
  4. A classic reference remains Jones (2003). For a more recent treatment, see Hoffman (2015).
  5. Boxer (1975), pp. 52–3.
  6. Broadberry and Harrison (2005), p. 27; Urlanis (1971), p. 295.
  7. The Americans lost more than 100,000 soldiers in the First World War, and around 300,000 in the Second (see the previous note for sources).
  8. L’armée française n’est pas la seule à se sacrifier. Au prix de lourdes pertes, les Canadiens mènent l’offensive à Vimy, les Britanniques à Passchendaele, les Italiens sont vaincus à Caporetto. Les États-Unis rompent avec l’isolationnisme et s’engagent aux côtés de l’Entente. L’arrivée progressive des soldats américains change le rapport de forces et va contribuer à forger la victoire . . . Traversée par les deux révolutions, la Russie connaît de profonds bouleversements et signe, le 15 décembre, un armistice avec l’Allemagne.’ http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/173002294.html.  Author’s translation.
  9. Quand on vit à Compiègne, ou plus loin, là-bas en Belgique, aux Pays-Bas, en Allemagne, aimer la paix, c’est aimer l’Europe. Ses peuples, ses cultures, sa diversité, bien sûr. C’est aimer s’y promener, y étudier, en découvrir les beautés et l’histoire. Mais c’est aussi aimer l’Europe politique, celle des libertés, de la citoyenneté commune. C’est l’aimer avec ses imperfections, ses insuffisances. Malgré sa complexité ou ses lenteurs. Oui, aimer la paix quand on est Européen, c’est aimer l’Europe. Une Europe qui nous rappelle à la fois les valeurs éternelles qui nous unissent et les désastres qui nous ont endeuillés.’ http://www.gouvernement.fr/partage/9722-commemoration-de-l-armistice-clairiere-de-rethondes. Author’s translation.
  10. ‘My Tory colleagues have actively whitewashed Remembrance Sunday to fuel their dreams of a hard Brexit’, Independent, Friday 3 November 2017. Available at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/remembrance-sunday-ww1-ww2-government-whitewash-indian-polish-french-soldiers-a8035521.html.
  11. Headrick (1981), p. 3. See also Findlay and O’Rourke (2007).
  12. In some parts of the world the process started surprisingly early: for a recent overview of the phenomenon, see O’Rourke and Williamson (2017).
  13. Cited, for example, in Roberts (2018), p. 897.
  14. Sans l’empire, la France ne serait qu’un pays libéré. Grâce à son empire, la France est un pays vainqueur.’
  15. It was to some, as we will see in the next chapter.
  16. Voyez-vous, mes chers amis, nous vivons encore aujourd’hui sur une fiction qui consiste à dire: il y a quatre «Grands» dans le monde. Eh bien, il n’y a pas quatre Grands, il y en a deux: l’Amérique et la Russie. Il y en aura un troisième à la fin du siècle: la Chine. Il dépend de vous qu’il y en ait un quatrième: l’Europe.’ Journal Officiel de la République française, 6 July 1957, p. 3305. Author’s translation.
  17. Huberman  (2012).
  18. Simms (2017), p. 164.
  19. Milward (2000).
  20. According to Eichengreen (2007), the bargains involved workers moderating wage growth, which increased profits, but required capitalists to use those profits to invest in new and better jobs, rather than paying them out to shareholders as dividends.
  21. Milward (2000), p. 18.
  22. The argument of the following paragraphs is based on Milward (2000, pp. 186–90).
  23. Articles 119 and 120. The text of the treaty may be consulted at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:11957E/TXT&from=EN; an English translation is available at https://ec.europa.eu/romania/sites/romania/files/tratatul_de_la_roma.pdf.
  24. Milward (2000), p. 190.
  25. Milward (2000).
  26. O’Rourke (1997), O’Rourke and Williamson (1999).
  27. Tracy (1989), chap. 11.
  28. Ibid., p. 219.
  29. Mitchell (2003), Tables B1 and J2.

CHAPTER 2: NINETEENTH-CENTURY LEGACIES

  1. Simms (2017), p. xiv.
  2. Williamson (2011).
  3. O’Rourke (1997), p. 791.
  4. The figures are taken from the Bank of England’s excellent dataset, a millennium of macroeconomic data, available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/research-datasets.
  5. Clark et al. (2014) find, using computable general equilibrium techniques, that the impact of trade on British economic welfare was an order of magnitude higher in the 1850s than in the 1760s.
  6. Offer (1989), Lambert (2012). For a recent theoretical exploration of some of the issues involved, see Bonfatti and O’Rourke (2018).
  7. Williamson (1990).
  8. Irwin (1989). The standard reference on the Repeal of the Corn Laws is the excellent book on the subject by Schonhardt-Bailey (2006).
  9. Zebel (1940), pp. 169, 171.
  10. Chamberlain (1885).
  11. Loughlin (1992), p. 212.
  12. Ibid., p. 214.
  13. Cited in Evans (2017).
  14. ‘The true conception of Empire’, 1897, in which Chamberlain further stated:‘No doubt, in the first instance, when these conquests have been made, there has been bloodshed, there has been loss of life among the native populations, loss of still more precious lives among those who have been sent out to bring these countries into some kind of disciplined order, but it must be remembered that that is the condition of the mission we   have to fulfil . . . You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs, you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force.’
  15. Chamberlain (1903), p. 7.
  16. Ibid., p. 18.
  17. Ibid., p. ix.
  18. Offer (1989), p. 402. The speech on 15 May was cautiously worded, merely asking for public debate on the issue; but it was clear where Chamberlain’s preferences lay.
  19. The latter statement is not quite true. Even after the switch to free trade, the UK retained tariffs for revenue-raising purposes on goods that were subject to domestic excise duties (notably alcoholic drinks) or that were not produced at all domestically (e.g, tea and tobacco). French wine imported into Britain was thus subject to tariffs. However, there was no great British wine industry benefiting from this protection, and British beer, whisky and whiskey manufacturers were subject to equivalent excise duties. Douglas Irwin describes British tariffs during the period as ‘the natural extension of domestic excise taxes to foreign goods’ (Irwin, 1993, p. 147). It seems only fair to mention that John Nye (1991, 1993) strongly disagrees with this assessment.
  20. Dangerfield (1966), p. 22. 21. Sykes (1979), p. 40.
  21. Sykes (1979), p. 35.
  22. Coats (1968), p. 184.
  23. As the historian Frank Trentmann (2008, p. 185) puts it, ‘Joseph Chamberlain was the best thing that could have happened to Free Trade.’
  24. Sykes (1979), p. 285.
  25. Offer (1989), Broadberry and Harrison (2005). The argument that Allied victory in the First World War was largely due to economic factors is usefully summarized in https://voxeu.org/article/world-war-i-why-allies-won.
  26. http://opac.oireachtas.ie/AWData/Library3/Library2/DL067254.pdf, p. 13.
  27. The conference also called for common product standards throughout the Empire because of the advantages these would confer on both consumers and producers, and the increases in trade that would result: shades of the European Single Market of the 1990s. Ibid., pp. 45–6, 54–5.
  28. Hansard, Commons Sitting of Thursday, 4 February, 1932.
  29. de Bromhead et al. (2019).
  30. Condliffe (1941), p. 287.
  31. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/history_e/tradewardarkhour41_e.htm.
  32. https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_01_e.htm.
  33. Ibid.

CHAPTER 3: THE PATH TO ROME 

  1.   Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), p. 8. 
  2. Ibid., p. 18.
  3. See https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-160/articles-wsc-s-three-majestic-circles/.
  4. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), pp. 51–2.
  5. Ibid., p. 39.
  6. Roberts (2018), pp. 900, 917.
  7. Ibid., p. 71.
  8. I enjoy pointing this out to multinational groups of students since it irritates both the British and the French, albeit for different reasons.
  9. The OEEC became the OECD of our own day in 1961, with Canada and the United States joining in that year.
  10. Initially, Germany was represented at the OEEC by two delegations acting on behalf of the Anglo-American Bizone and the French occupied zone. There were thus eighteen participants, rather than seventeen, in  the original OEEC. In 1949 the British, French and American occupation zones were merged to form the Federal Republic of Germany, henceforth referred to for simplicity as ‘Germany’. In addition, that portion of the Free Territory of Trieste which was under Anglo-American control also participated in the organization, until it was handed back to Italy in 1954.
  11. Urwin (1995), p. 20.
  12. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), p. 68.
  13. Dollars were convertible, but no one had enough of them.
  14. The classic reference on the EPU is Eichengreen (1993).
  15. The text of the treaty is available on the site of the now-defunct Western European Union, www.weu.int. Unlike the Treaty of Dunkirk, which had been signed by the UK and France a mere six months earlier, the Treaty of Brussels did not single out Germany as the only potential aggressor, although it was named as a potential aggressor.
  16. I recognize that the title of this chapter and the present subsection has become a cliché, but I am using it in part in memory of my godfather Joe, whose first present to his future wife Pauline was a copy of Belloc’s book.
  17. Cette proposition réalisera les premières assises concrètes d’une Fédération européenne indispensable à la préservation de la paix.’
  18. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), pp. 125–9. 19. Ibid., p. 129.
  19. Ibid., p. 144.
  20. See notably Gillingham (1995).
  21. Eichengreen and Boltho (2010).
  22. Gillingham (1995).
  23. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), pp. 169–72. 25. Milward (2000), pp. 151–71.
  24. Camps (1964), chap. II.
  25.   Ibid., p. 39.

28.  Ibid., p. 41.

  1. Kaiser (1996), pp. 48–9; Schaad (1998), pp. 44–5.
  2. Kaiser (1996), pp. 91–2.
  3. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:11957E/TXT&from=EN. An English translation is available at https://ec.europa.eu/romania/sites/romania/files/tratatul_de_la_roma.pdf.

CHAPTER 4: BRENTRY

  1. Bromund (2001), p. 77.
  2. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), pp. 210-12.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Cited in Bromund (2001), p. 81.
  5. See Kaiser (1996), Moravcsik (1998), Schaad (1998), Ellison (2000). 6. Camps (1964), p. 102.
  6. Lynch (2000), Warlouzet (2008).
  7. Kaiser (1996), Ellison (2000), Camps (1964), Warlouzet (2011).
  8. As we saw in the previous chapter the European Communities had since 1967 brought together the ECSC, the EEC and EURATOM. The European Community, on the other hand, is the name given to the EEC under the Treaty of Maastricht from 1993 onwards (see Chapter 8).
  9. Finland was also involved in the discussions. However, the latter state was not even a member of the OEEC, and given its relationship with the Soviet Union would have to content itself with associate membership of EFTA, beginning in 1961.
  10. Kaiser (1996), pp. 101–7.
  11. Young (1993), p. 67.

13.  Urwin (1995), pp. 117–20.

  1.   Hennessy (2006), p. 615.
  2. Camps (1964), Kaiser (1996).
  3. Camps (1964), p. 336.
  4. Catterall (ed.) (2011), p. 313.
  5. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), pp. 271, 278, 285.
  6. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), p. 290.
  7. For a recent discussion see Jackson (2018), pp. 584–94.
  8. Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), p. 288; the citation is my translation. The original reads: ‘un autre marché commun . . . celui qu’on bâtirait à onze. Et puis à treize. Et puis peut-être à dix-huit . . . Il est à prévoir que la cohésion de tous ses membres qui seraient très nombreux, très divers n’y résisterait pas longtemps. Et qu’en définitive il apparaîtrait une Communauté atlantique colossale sous dépendance et direction américaine.’ The text of the 14 January 1963 press conference is available, inter alia, at https://www.les-crises.fr/ les-deux-veto-du-general-de-gaulle-a-langleterre/.
  9. Moravcsik (1998, 2000a, 2000b).
  10. The four countries had submitted membership applications in 1967, and had again been vetoed by de Gaulle. On this occasion, however, their applications had remained dormant, rather than being withdrawn.
  11. Rae et al. (2006).
  12. As a result, aged ten, I and my family moved, not to Oslo, where an Irish embassy would have been opened had the vote gone the other way, but to Brussels, arriving there on April Fool’s Day 1973.
  13. The words are those of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, from 1962: see Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016), p. 293. Not only was Europe less multiracial than the Commonwealth, it was also largely Catholic, and British socialists could be just as susceptible to the ambient anti-Catholicism of the period as their conservative compatriots. Ernest Bevin, whom we have already met, shared the prejudice, as did his deputy at the Foreign Office, Kenneth Younger. While sympathetic to the Schuman Plan, Younger worried that it might ‘be just a step in the consolidation of the Catholic “black international”, which I have always thought to be a big driving force behind the Council of Europe’ (Young 1999, pp. 50–51). In fairness to Younger, it was surely significant that Christian Democrats were in government in all six founding member states during 1950–52.

This transnational network ‘fulfilled multiple functions, not least creating political trust, deliberating policy, especially on European integration, marginalising internal dissent within the national parties, socialising new members into an existing policy consensus, coordinating government policy-making and facilitating Parliamentary ratification of integration treaties. These and other functions together provided crucial guarantees   for the exercise of what political scientists have called entrepreneurial leadership by politicians like Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, for example, by limiting their domestic political risks in a decisive way to facilitate bold and at times extremely controversial policy choices.’ In turn, these choices reflected a common project of middle-class Catholic elites ‘for creating an integrated Europe based on a curious mélange of traditional confessional notions of occidental culture and anti-communism and  broadly liberal economic ideas’ (Kaiser 2007, pp. 9–10).

  1. His speech is available online at https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/05f2996b-000b-4576-8b42-8069033a16f9/publishable_en.pdf.

28.  Young (1999), p. 292.

29.  Young (1999), p. 240.

  1. Saunders (2018), p. 306.
  2. Saunders (2018), pp. 123–4.

CHAPTER 5: THE SINGLE MARKET PROGRAMME 

  1. Eichengreen (2007).
  2. The standard reference on stagflation is probably still Bruno and Sachs (1985).
  3. Eichengreen (2007), Crafts and O’Rourke (2014).
  4. The figures are calculated based on the data on GDP deflator inflation given in the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

5.    Young (1999), pp. 307–8.

  1. The share has declined to around 40 per cent today: see https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/sites/agriculture/files/cap-post-2013/graphs/graph1_en.pdf.
  2. In fact Mrs Thatcher didn’t quite say ‘I want my money back’ at the press conference following the Council, but she very nearly did: see https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104180.
  3. The White Paper is available online at http://aei.pitt.edu/1113/1/internal_market_wp_COM_85_310.pdf.
  4. Emerson (1988).
  5. There were ten member states when the White Paper was published in 1985. On 1 January 1986 Portugal and Spain joined the European Communities, bringing the number of member states to twelve.
  6. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?isOldUri=true&uri=CELEX:61978CJ0120.
  7. The text of the Single European Act is available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:11986U/TXT.
  8. L’art de l’imposition consiste à plumer l’oie pour obtenir le plus possible de plumes avec le moins possible de cris.’ The initial (tax-inclusive) rate was 16.75 per cent. The German in question was Wilhelm von Siemens, the American Thomas Adams, but it is the Frenchman Maurice Lauré who is called ‘le père de la TVA’. According to some definitions, the first VAT appeared in France in 1948. See Södersten (2000) and Ebrill et al. (2001), on whom much of what follows is based.
  9. Although at the time of writing the European Commission is proposing a turnover tax to be levied on digital services companies above a certain size.
  10. This is how the retail sales tax works in theory. In practice many retail sales taxes end up being paid by businesses, as noted in the text below.
  11. I am assuming here, for the sake of simplicity, that the consumer does not respond to the higher price of beer in the pub by drinking less. If she did, that would obviously hit all three businesses’ sales; or more systematically, thinking about adjustments in the economy as a whole, it might lower the prices they each receive for their output.
  12.   Ring (1989).
  13. Article III.
  14. Article XVI.
  15. The discussion that follows is based on Keen and Smith (1996), Crawford et al. (2010), and Cnossen’s comment on Crawford et al. in the same volume.
  16. Unfortunately, the delay between the times when the export VAT is refunded and import VAT is paid gives rise to profitable opportunities for fraud. In 2017 the European Commission claimed that so-called ‘carousel fraud’ costs taxpayers €50 billion annually. This involves fictitious companies setting up with the sole purpose of importing goods from an accomplice in the exporting country (that recoups export VAT from the government); when the time comes for them to pay their import VAT they have vanished. Eventually the goods can be re-exported back to the original country (and perhaps the original firm), with export VAT being reclaimed, and then the carousel can recommence. See for example Crawford et al. (2010).
  17. See https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/voting-system/qualified-majority/.
  18. Article 18.2.
  19. Young (1999), p. 338.

CHAPTER 6: IRELAND, EUROPE AND THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT 

  1. Unless you consider the abbreviation ‘UK’ to be an adjective.
  2. ‘Politics and the English Language’, 1946. Widely available online, for example at https://archive.org/details/PoliticsAndTheEnglishLanguage.
  3. Shipman (2017).
  4. Which helps to explain the presence of Irish colleges in many European cities, including Paris, whose function was to educate Irish Catholics. The Parisian college, on the rue des Irlandais, is now an Irish cultural centre.
  5. See note 26 in Chapter 4.
  6. Wales and England had previously been united in 1536.
  7. In 1913 the militias were organized into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
  8. A rebranding of the Irish Volunteers.
  9. A facsimile of the treaty is available at http://treaty.nationalarchives.ie/the-treaty/.
  10. The Northern Ireland Census 1991, Religion Report, available at https://www.nisra.gov.uk/sites/nisra.gov.uk/files/publications/1991-census-religion-report.pdf. Another option would have been to choose only the four Ulster counties with Protestant majorities, while yet another would have been to choose all of Ulster. The actual solution led to a substantial Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, and a small Protestant minority in the Irish Free State.
  11. Leary (2016), p. 125.
  12. The declaration came unexpectedly when the Irish Taoiseach, John A. Costello, was on an official visit to Canada, and there has been speculation over the years about why it happened. When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1980s the distinguished Irish Studies Professor John Kelleher, who had been there at the time, gave me the Cambridge Massachusetts explanation. Costello apparently visited Harvard before going to Canada, and was shown the Irish book collection in Widener Library. Unfortunately, the idiosyncratic cataloguing system used there shelved (and for all I know still shelves) Irish-related history books under the bookmark ‘Br’: Br for Britain. The librarians realized that this might be provocative, and got a workman to do up a sign with an ‘Ir’ bookmark for the occasion. Unfortunately, he only arrived to nail it up on the shelves while the Taoiseach was being shown around, and offence was duly taken. And the rest, according to Kelleher, was history.
  13. The legislation is available at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/ 12-13-14/41/enacted.
  14. For a fascinating account of these ‘word wars’ see Mary Daly’s ‘Ireland: The Politics of Nomenclature’, available at http://www.these-islands.co.uk/publications/i279/ireland_the_politics_of_nomenclature.aspx.
  15. There is good evidence for occupational segmentation, which was one important driver of inequality: as late as 1992 only 5 per cent of the workforce at Harland and Wolff, the famous shipbuilding company, was Catholic (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/2861269.stm). While there are few good empirical studies of discrimination per se, there is anecdotal evidence of discrimination when it came to hiring and promotions.
  16. Based on Table 8 in the 1971 Northern Irish Census’s Religion Tables, available at https://www.nisra.gov.uk/sites/nisra.gov.uk/files/publications/1971-census-religion-tables.PDF.
  17. Pašeta (2003), p. 110.
  18. All figures are calculated based on the Sutton Index of Deaths; the cross- tabulations are available at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/crosstabs.html.
  19. https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/serie/000067671.
  20. The text of the agreement is available at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/sunningdale/agreement.htm.
  21. The quotations are taken from the said committee’s report, available at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldeucom/76/7607.htm.
  22. The minister in question being Paddy Hillery.
  23. The text of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is available at https://www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/treatyseries/uploads/documents/treaties/docs/198502.pdf.
  24. The text of the Declaration is available at https://www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/ourrolesandpolicies/northernireland/peace-process–joint-declaration-1993.pdf.
  25. You will recall that Sinn Féin was also the name of the party that swept to victory in the 1918 general election and achieved independence subsequently. The Sinn Féin politicians who accepted the treaty founded Cumann na nGaedhal, which subsequently merged with other smaller groupings to form Fine Gael, the party currently (September 2018) in power in Dublin. Those who did not, but who eventually entered Dáil Éireann in the 1920s under Éamon de Valera, formed the Fianna Fáil party as we have already seen.
  26. The text of the Good Friday Agreement is available at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/agreement.htm.
  27. I am using the Census’s ‘Classification 1’, and excluding respondents who identified themselves as having in whole or in part another EU identity (i.e. an EU identity other than British or Irish). The data are available at http://www.ninis2.nisra.gov.uk/Download/Census%202011_Winzip/2011/DC2238NI%20(a).ZIP.
  28. In contrast, only 2 per cent of Protestants defined themselves as ‘Irish only’, and 16 per cent as ‘Northern Irish only’. The percentage of Protestants defining themselves as Irish declined during the Troubles: as might have been expected, violence led to a hardening of attitudes making a political settlement harder to find. 55% of Catholics defined themselves as ‘Irish only’.
  29. http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/european-union-committee/brexit-ukirish-relations/ oral/42544.html.
  30. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldeucom/76/7607.htm#_idTextAnchor069.
  31. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-42412972.

CHAPTER 7: EUROPE AND THE IRISH ECONOMIC MIRACLE 

  1. This chapter is in large part an abbreviated version of O’Rourke (2017), which was itself a revised version of a lecture delivered on 11 November 2016 at the NUIG National Conference entitled ‘1916–2016: The Promise and Challenge of National Sovereignty’.
  2. The data are available at www.cso.ie, Key Table E2001.
  3. For a similar discussion, see Ó Gráda (1997), pp. 2–4.
  4. I document this at great length in O’Rourke (2017).
  5. Neary and Ó Gráda (1991); O’Rourke (1991).
  6. Ó Gráda (1997), pp. 21–5.
  7. O’Rourke (2017) also discusses the recurrent balance of payments crises of the period, a problem that Ireland shared with the UK and other former British colonies.
  8. Clemens and Williamson (2004).
  9. In light of recent controversies it is interesting to note that this soon  figured as a potential concern on the radar screens of foreign governments, appearing to be potentially in breach of the OEEC ban on artificial aids to exporters. The OEEC approved the initiative, however, since it seemed to signal a growing outward orientation on the part of the Irish government (Barry and O’Mahony, 2016).
  10. de la Escosura and Sanz (1996), pp. 369–70. 11. Costa et al. (2016), pp. 308–9.
  11. Paavonen (2004).
  12. Freris (1986), pp. 201–2.
  13. The classic reference remains Maher (1986). On the history of Ireland’s subsequent membership of the EU, see for example Laffan and O’Mahony (2008).
  14. Freris (1986), pp. 171–2.
  15. Kopsidis and Ivanov (2017), p. 108.
  16. Ferreira da Silva (2016). According to the same author, the inflow in 1961 was as high as the total inflow experienced during the entire 1950s.
  17. Barry and Bradley (1997), p. 1809.
  18. Recall that EFTA aimed not only to dismantle industrial tariffs between its own member states, but eventually to negotiate tariff reductions vis-à-vis the EEC as well.
  19. Which is when reliable GDP estimates for Wales and Northern Ireland become available.
  20. See Chapter 5 and Ó Gráda and O’Rourke (1996).
  21. Campos et al. (2014).
  22. Katzenstein (1985).
  23. Ó Gráda and O’Rourke (2000).

One reply on “A Short History of Brexit”

I do hope it’s as unbiased and impartial as most of the Irish media’s coverage of Brexit to date.
So far the number of articles I’ve read or programmes I’ve seen that even attempt to understand why the referendum result went the way it did can be counted on the fingers of one hands.
Instead most have lapsed into lazy Brit-bashing,clichéd caricatures and parroting whatever line government spin doctors feed the hacks that day.
Only now as a No Deal Brexit looms are people in Ireland beginning to wake up to the economic realities of how much this country depends on the neighbour its media has been trashing for the last two and a half years.
Of course there’ll be nothing to worry about as the EU comes to Ireland’s aid to pick up the slack….

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