The Legal Architecture of De-Europeanisation: Managing Border Conflicts after Brexit

Scholarship on the Europeanisation of border conflicts explains how closer integration can transform them. This article addresses the reverse case. It examines how the EU and the UK have managed the de-Europeanisation of three border conflicts – Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and the UK Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus – through the Withdrawal Agreement Protocols and the Agreement on Gibraltar. Three legal techniques recur: sovereignty disclaimers that quarantine the underlying territorial disputes; the extraterritorial application of EU law to keep contested borders functionally invisible; and bespoke governance mechanisms for institutional oversight and dispute resolution. Each is calibrated to the intensity of the underlying sovereignty dispute and the depth of integration required to prevent border hardening. The article enriches the literature on differentiated disintegration with an account of its territorial and conflict-related dimensions, and recasts the neo-functional peace as a method of conflict management capable of operating in either direction.