With the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, it's natural to wonder what this means
for the EU going forward. And there's really two different ways to think
about it. One, if you want to be optimistic about the
European project, is that the EU could actually be stronger
without the UK in it. To understand how, it helps to look at the
history of the EU And the idea is to take this continent that
is the cradle of a wonderful civilization, but has also been the scene of some incredibly
destructive wars, some horrific political crimes, and make sure that kind of thing can
never happen again. And the idea was if they unified the steel
and coal industries across national boundaries, they wouldn't be able to fight wars with one
another. But the UK was never completely on board.
They weren't one of the six original countries to join up
they joined a little bit reluctantly, they didn't want to join the single currency project.
And English people have, in a geographic sense, often not felt that they are even quote unquote
part of Europe. So, to an extent they've always been the marginal member, and if anyone is
going to leave, it would be them. Once the UK is out, the remaining
countries might be able to get some important things done, like crafting a common immigration
and foreign policy, which the EU doesn’t have, and trying to figure out a way to make the
common currency work better. They don’t have a common tax policy, they
don’t have a common welfare state It may be easier for the countries that remain
to build stronger institutions, And you may ultimately see a stronger, even
though it’s a smaller Europe. That’s the optimistic view
Now, another view could be that we're looking at the beginning of the unraveling of the
whole thing. You start pulling a thread on the sweater,
and it's all going to collapse. You see polls from France and even Germany, the countries
at the very heart of Europe, showing that it's become unpopular.
They don’t feel ownership over European politics.
It's a bunch of guys, sitting around in a Belgian city, negotiating deals in a language
they don't speak. They don’t have a spirit of European patriotism
and a deep, emotional European identity. The EU has a lot of the attributes of a nation state.
It has a flag, they have a national anthem, but it doesn't have any words.
If you fielded a single EU soccer team, it would win the World Cup every time, but no one would cheer for it.
So, a lot of how this turns in the end has to do with what kind of deal the UK can reach with the EU.
If the UK manages to get out but to then still have a really favorable free trade
deal with the EU and really sort of prosper, that's going to make it easier for other countries
to say well, they want out too every time
a decision happens that they don't like.
So there's a strong incentive to make this messy, to make it really as painful as possible.
If EU leaders manage to exact a high price from the UK in leaving, that means that probably
the rest of the union is not going to break up.