THE ISLAND of Ireland is not normally conceived as being located south of the neighbouring larger island called Great Britain, or as south of Europe, but we want to suggest here that it could be. We have earlier already argued that the ‘South’ in the term ‘Global South’ is not a geographical but rather a socio-historical category. In what follows we want to deepen this reasoning and make it more concrete by applying it to Europe and its plural South.

Towards that end, the current dispute over the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (in what follows: UK) from the European Union (EU) is briefly discussed in light of the difficulties of separating political entities in our time of high global interconnectedness, focusing on the crucial issue of the relation between Great Britain and the island of Ireland. More specifically, the UK–EU dispute is compared to the separation of Algeria from France and the exit of South Africa from the British Commonwealth, thus opening the path towards pluralising the notion of the ‘South’. Such pluralisation allows the investigation of historically formed asymmetric relations between societies beyond the formal concept of colonialism, bearing in mind that the relation between Great Britain and Ireland could be formally called colonial at best with regard to few aspects and for limited historical periods. Against this background, subsequently, the transformation of the relation between EU countries and their former colonies from the 1970s onwards is analysed in terms of attempts to re-regulate the relation between Europe and its South after decolonisation. These attempts aim at drawing clear lines of separation, but they keep failing because the South reveals itself as a moving target, impossible to confine to a restricted space. Thus, in conclusion, current Northward migration and climate change are discussed in terms of global social and ecological injustice, the significance of which Europe cannot deny, as hard as it may try.