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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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After the vote, an existential crisis for an integrated Europe

Britain’s departure forces EU to take hard look at itself

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BERLIN — Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union plunges the 28-nation bloc into an existential crisis, dealing the dream of an integrated Europe its greatest blow since the march toward unity began in the aftermath of World War II.

That effort now faces a great leap back, with Britain’s exit carrying global ramifications. Its departure is set to upend trade deals and is already roiling financial markets, including those in Asia, North America and Europe. It will splinter — and significantly weaken — the EU, the bloc of nations most closely allied with the United States. A newly divided Europe, observers fret, may also embolden Russia while diluting the power and influence of the West.

The fear of EU supporters now is that the British vote may have captured a zeitgeist, a deep-seated resentment of globalization that spans the Atlantic, a feeling that may translate into greater nationalism and a stand-alone mentality. The question is whether Britain’s move to become the first nation to exit the union will mark the start of a cascade of similar referendums that could threaten the bloc’s very survival.

Populists across Europe lauded the British vote as an opportunity to abandon the “European project” of political and economic unity. Right-wing leaders in France and Holland, among other countries, tweeted their support for EU-exit referendums.

As it departs the union, Britain may lose much of its voice in European affairs. But the rest of Europe stands to suffer, too; most experts predict at least a freezing if not a serious rollback of decades of strides toward regional integration. The EU, experts say, will be forced to take a hard look at itself. Its caretakers now must undertake not only a messy extraction of Britain, but a reinvention of the bloc in a manner that makes it more accessible and vital to voters across Europe.

Britain’s exit is likely to provoke “a crisis of tremendous proportions, one beyond any that we have known so far,” said Steven Blockmans, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies. “You are not dealing with just one crisis but several interlocking ones.”

Even if the rest of the EU manages to hold itself together without Britain, the fallout could still be severe. A continent already facing a convergence of woes — including a refugee crisis, lingering sovereign debt problems and a continuing, low-grade war in Ukraine — will now find its attention monopolized by protracted negotiations over Britain’s withdrawal.

When the EU and Britain finally do part ways — a process expected to take at least two years — the bloc will be greatly diminished.

Gone will be its most significant military and diplomatic power, as well as the second-largest economy in a union stretching from Ireland to Greece, Latvia to Portugal. What’s left will be a bloc more centered than ever on its most populous and economically powerful nation — Germany.

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