The "Irish" border is often wrongly presented as a foreign obstacle: the so-called "Irish Question". In reality the border is the UK's border and those who wish to "Bin the Backstop" should consider the risks to the existence of the United Kingdom if that were to happen.
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Prime Minister Theresa May’s motivation for agreeing to the Backstop is to protect the gains of the Northern Ireland peace process which ended 30 years of civil war in this country.
The EU is fundamentally a peace project so border questions are existential for them. British views of the EU as simply a common market have always been misguided. The EU uses economics and law as a means not an end. EU27 Brexit positions need to be understood in this context.
Indeed, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s homeland of Luxembourg was first established as an independent state as a compromise in a dispute over the border between Prussia and the Netherlands.
EU Council President Donald Tusk credits his political awakening as coming from watching protests against the Iron Curtain as a teenager in Communist Poland.
The fall of the Berlin Wall served as the catalyst for Angela Merkel's political career too. For her and her peers throughout former Soviet and Yugoslav states the value of the EU peace project is lived experience.
EU chief negotiator Michael Barnier, for his part, cut his political teeth in the Gaullist tradition which has always sought to use the European Project as a means to protect French sovereignty from their historic enemy Germany.
These leaders do not want to be a responsible for erecting new barriers or creating new divisions in Europe.
In an Irish context border disputes and a peace process underpinned by the EU are lived experience too. Both the Taoiseach and Tánaiste are from what are today called “the Good Friday generation”. They came of age as the peace process and ceasefires began.
Some bodies of ‘the disappeared’ victims of the IRA are said to have been secretly buried on the bog land next to the farm where Irish Europe Minister Helen McEntee grew up. The Good Friday Agreement is central to their political outlook.
For these reasons the backstop isn’t going away. As Theresa May said herself today, "whatever future relationship you want there is no deal which does not include the backstop". It is becoming increasingly clear that the border question is consequently existential for the UK too.
A soft Brexit is necessary for Northern Ireland and Scotland but anathema to England and Wales. A hard Brexit is necessary for England and Wales but anathema to Northern Ireland and Scotland.
The problem is thus no longer “the Irish Question”. It has become “the British question” because, in the rush to leave the European Union, Brexit now risks the of breakup of the United Kingdom’s own “precious union”.
