Brexit Day Arrives, Fracturing Europe and United Kingdom

“After the referendum I was asked by a paper (after listing a long list of negative impacts) about any upsides to Brexit,” said Fabian Zuleeg, chief economist at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank, on Twitter. “My view then and now: there are none. Self-harm at a monumental scale, destroying opportunities for next generations plus collateral damage for the EU.”

The Guardian newspaper echoed this outlook on its front page Friday: “Small island,” read a subdued headline over a photo of a small union jack sticking out of sand castle on a beach with the white cliffs of Dover in the background.

With the U.K.'s departure, the EU will lose 15% of its economy, 66 million citizens, 5% of its territory, the financial capital of London and a nuclear-armed permanent member of the U.N. Security Council with global reach through its embassies, spy network and English language.

“[Brexit] weakens Britain more than the EU, but there is no getting away from the fact that seeing a major member state leave the European Union will weaken the union,” said Michael Leigh, academic director in European public policy at the Johns Hopkins University campus in Bologna, in a telephone interview Friday.

He said the EU will carry less weight in trade and on security matters without the U.K.: “It reduces the credibility of the EU.”

The loss of the U.K. will alter the political equation in Europe too: Until now, France, Germany and the U.K. were the big players in EU decisions. Now, this three-sided debate is turning into a two-sided one, he said.

“There has been a balance of power between these three,” Leigh said. “You will now not have a big three but a big two. France's position will be strengthened at the core of EU decision making.”

That's because Germany and the U.K. often were in agreement in many areas, including on freer trade policy, pushing for a single market within the EU and expanding the bloc's membership. France, meanwhile, tended to favor restricting trade and it was hesitant about adding new members, such as those in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. However, militarily France and Britain tended to want to exert power beyond Europe.

Leigh said he expects Britain's departure to weaken the EU's free-trade orientation. He also said countries like Poland and Sweden that don't use the euro, the bloc's single currency, may find it harder without the U.K. to fend off efforts to see them adopt the euro. Britain retained its currency, the pound, one of several exceptions to EU rules that the U.K. won for itself during its 47 years of EU membership.

But it's not as though Brexit was born only a few years ago. In fact, the U.K.'s participation in the “European project,” as the EU is called, was fraught with difficulties from the outset.

After World War II, former French President Charles de Gaulle warned against allowing an "incompatible" Britain to join the economic union that was beginning to form out of the ruins of the war, and France vetoed its membership requests.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was Britain's left wing that was skeptical about joining the European common market for they believed it was a capitalist project. By the 1980s, those on the right in Britain began to worry that power was being centralized in Brussels.

In a famous speech in 1988, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned of a European superstate threatening Britain's sovereignty. She was opposed to the growing need for common rules as the EU's single market expanded.

Euroskepticism among Britain's right wing grew, stoked by a conservative and anti-EU British press, including Johnson, the current prime minister, who attacked the EU during his years as a Brussels-based correspondent. Anti-European sentiment grew even louder after the 2008 financial crisis and the electoral successes of a right-wing nationalist party, the U.K. Independence Party, under the leadership of Nigel Farage and his anti-EU message.

By 2014, Farage's party easily won the U.K. elections for the European Parliament, posing a major threat to the Conservative Party. To fend off Farage, then-Prime Minister David Cameron fatefully called for a referendum on EU membership. Cameron thought he could quiet the revolt against the EU by holding a referendum where a majority was expected to vote to remain in the EU.

Instead, the opposite happened: The leavers won, in no small part because the referendum took place at a time of deep anxiety in Europe as millions of refugees from war-torn and poverty-struck Asia and Africa arrived in Europe and attacks by Islamist terrorists were heightening fears.

Leigh, the Johns Hopkins University professor, said Brexit was not inevitable, but he said it “came down to major leadership failures” by Britain's political leaders.

(Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.)

Follow @cainburdeau

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Email *

Submit