Irish Foreign Policy and European Political Cooperation from Membership to Maastricht:Navigating Neutrality

This chapter examines Irish conceptions of neutrality from the interwar period until the 1990s, and the impact that accession to the European Communities had on Irish foreign policy during the first two decades after EC membership. Specifically, it investigates how Irish governments attempted to pursue a foreign policy of military neutrality in parallel with the Community’s on-going efforts at deepening foreign policy cooperation. It challenges the existing scholarly narrative that a process of creeping Europeanisation took place after accession and argues that, in the Irish case, exposure to the integration process resulted in non-change rather than adaptation regarding foreign policy. Moreover, eutrality, rather than being whittled away through membership in the EC/EU, was recast as an important part of Ireland’s European identity