Rather than centralising power, the union should realise that challenging members’ national identities sparks resistance
In fewer than 100 days, Brexit will have been completed. Britain will be outside the European Union customs union and the internal market. But Brexit poses questions for the EU as well as for Britain. It challenges what might be called the ideology of Europe. It is, after all, a serious matter for a democratic organisation when a major member state decides to leave.
“It would,” declared Donald Tusk, then president of the European council, shortly after the Brexit referendum in 2016, “be a fatal error to assume that the negative result in the UK referendum represents a specifically British issue … the Brexit vote is a desperate attempt to answer the questions that millions of Europeans ask themselves daily.”
