The Irish Neutrality Concept as an Example for Foreign Policy Strategies of Small States

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: International relations, grade: 1,0, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: This work takes a look at how small states are characterized in the political science discipline of international relations, and what kinds of strategies they use to secure their interests in a globalized world. With the example of Ireland as a small and classically neutral state, the focus thereby lays on the foreign policy strategy of neutrality. Why do small European states adopt a neutral foreign policy and how does this strategy influence the development of the state? To understand the theoretical background of this theme and to get a clear understanding of the term, first the theoretical concept of small states in international relations needs to be explained in a small overview including various definitions and approaches regarding their foreign policy. Proceeding from a review of their different strategies, the specific neutral strategy gets examined depending the the early political-historical background, different kinds of neutrality and neutrality rights. This will then be applied to the specific Irish case. More in-depth focused here is the question: can the Irish foreign policy in the 21st century still be phrased as neutral and what consequences are entailed in the answer? To achieve this, there is the need for an analysis of the Irish neutrality concept and it's development. This will be done in the third part of this work by reviewing the political-historical background of the Irish derivation of the neutrality concept and later also taking into account the latest white paper regarding Ireland's foreign policy from 2015. Also a glance at the meso-level in form of the Irish participation in international organizations like the European Union will be helpful to evaluate Ireland's degree of neutrality. At the end, cases of neutrality conflicts are gonna be pointed out and discussed in regard to the research question.