Umstrittene Schweizer Sicherheitspolitik ... - ETH Zürich

Rory Montgomery
of its implications regarding Northern Ireland’s position as part of the
United Kingdom. We had a territorial claim upon Northern Ireland, and
it was felt that for us it was incompatible with that to serve with the UK.
Since then, NATO membership has never been seriously considered, even
after the end of the Cold War. One of our principal opposition parties
briefly advocated it in the early 1990s, but it did not pursue the matter
once it had entered into a coalition government. While for example in
Finland, there is quite an active discussion of NATO membership, this
is not on the table in Ireland, nor will it be in the foreseeable future. We
did join Partnership for Peace in 1999, but with quite some controversy.
However, joining the United Nations in 1955 or joining the EU in
1973 was not seen as conflicting with neutrality. In general, for the Government
and at official level, the essential and defining characteristic of
our policy of military neutrality is non-membership of military alliances.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the Government made clear that it was not
ideologically neutral as between East and West. Successive Prime Ministers
at that time indicated openness to eventual membership of an EC
defence pact if political integration was to proceed that far.
Since the late 1970s and the early 1980s, there has been a certain change
in public mood. Some political activists and commentators have tried to
define neutrality in a broader way to encompass a sort of general unease
about the use of military force, a suspicion of the United States, big powers
and of NATO in general, and as a sort of opposition to developments in
the EU. They generally argued that neutrality involves an “ethical” foreign
policy approach to human rights, disarmament, and development. We
would say in reply that of course issues like human rights, disarmament,
and development are already part of our foreign policy. We would also
observe that countries like Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands are
also extremely active on these fronts without being neutral countries. In
other words, we do not see a necessary connection between neutrality
and a moral or an ethical foreign policy.
But it is fair to say that there has never been a fundamental or wideranging
political debate which achieved a clear national consensus. While
officially and at Government level, we are quite clear that neutrality is
non-membership of military alliances, I think in the public mind there
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