10 years on from the Brexit referendum

Safeguarding cross-border cooperation and the Good Friday Agreement: The Centre’s journey

A decade on from the referendum that would see the United Kingdom end its membership of the European Union, like many others the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation is still managing the uncertainties of a continually evolving post-Brexit landscape.

Given the Centre’s core mission, when on the 22nd February 2016 Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the referendum would take place on the 23rd of June, we directed our efforts at understanding what the potential consequences of the UK leaving the EU would be for cross-border cooperation and relations.

As an organisation whose establishment in September 1999 was inspired by how North-South and East-West cooperation and relations were at the heart of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, the question being asked of the UK electorate was of huge relevance to us.

How that question would be answered would also potentially impact on our relationship with EU Cohesion Policy, specifically its framework for territorial cohesion and cross-border cooperation and the funding that came with it.

This report, authored by Anthony Soares, serves as a record of how the Centre approached the June 2016 referendum and what its approach has been in the aftermath of its result.

It brings together excerpts from a number of key documents published by the Centre, tracing our own journey and how we sought to shine a light on the importance of taking cross-border cooperation and relations into account in the debates in the run-up to the referendum and in the negotiations on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU that followed.

Although this is not an exhaustive record of everything we published, nor can it include activities the Centre undertook in relation to Brexit, it contains extracts from both research briefings and responses to various relevant parliamentary inquiries.

As we recall our interventions in chronological order, we set them within the context of what was happening in the Brexit process each year that was of relevance to cross-border cooperation and relations.

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