BERLIN—Britain’s hard-fought referendum on whether to remain a member of the European Union is emblematic of a wider shift in Europe’s geopolitics. As much as the British want to believe their islands have a destiny separate from that of the continent, they have in fact been pacesetters for Europe writ large, from the consolidation of parliamentary democracy to the industrial revolution to the market reforms of the 1980s.
This year’s “Brexit” debate, although in many ways peculiarly British, has amplified broader trends in European politics—including questioning the fundamentals behind the unity of the continent—that are likely to intensify rather than subside. The future of Europe, the transatlantic alliance, and the international liberal order are all in play, and the June 23 referendum has done little to settle them.
First, globalization has produced a backlash in which national and local identities are ascendant. The British referendum campaign has underlined how a country whose cosmopolitan capital is a hub of global finance nonetheless prizes a more narrow English nationalism—even as pro-E.U. Scotland threatened to secede from the U.K. in the event of Brexit.
Residents of London, a bastion of “Remain” voters, see a hugely successful city whose multiracial, multilingual population resembles the world in miniature with even more richness. By contrast, many Brexit voters apparently viewed such diversity as a threat, succumbing to nativist appeals to clamp down on immigration—even though it has made Britain more prosperous and dynamic.
“Leave” voters were willing to risk economic calamity, including forecasts of a collapsing stock market and currency as well as a serious hit to household incomes, to assert their “independence” from Europe—attesting to the reality that people can be motivated by other considerations than just prosperity.
Second, the British referendum has highlighted a wider divide over how best to prosper in a competitive global economy. Brexiteers argued that the U.K. could more nimbly seize overseas trade and investment opportunities by cutting loose from the E.U.—even though the Union is the world’s trading superpower, pursuing ambitious free trade agreements in Asia and America over the heads of more protectionist member states, and despite the fact that Britain sends nearly half its exports to Europe.
“Leave” advocates painted a rosy picture of the dividends that would accrue from a U.K.-U.S. free trade agreement—even as U.S. leaders warned that England detached from Europe would go “to the back of the queue” in trade negotiations with the United States. Brexit supporters invoked Elizabethan England, when buccaneers scoured the world’s seas for treasure, as if the piracy of Sir Walter Raleigh were a relevant recipe for prosperity today.
Happily, the Leave campaign’s leaders did not promise the kind of protectionism that U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has advocated by opposing free trade agreements, arguing instead that Britain’s liberal economic instincts were being suppressed by Brussels bureaucrats. E.U. membership is probably a more liberalizing force in the U.K. than a protectionist one; under E.U. rules, Britain cannot impose unilateral tariffs to save its failing steel industry, for example.
Third, the referendum raises urgent questions about the future of European integration. According to Pew, nearly half of citizens of Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands hold unfavorable opinions of the E.U., as do 61 percent in France.
Populist movements are on the march across the continent: The National Front’s Marine Le Pen is predicted to win more votes than any establishment candidate in the first round of the 2017 presidential election in France. Anti-immigrant, nationalist parties have the support of a quarter of voters in bastions of moderation like Sweden.
Some on the continent actually support Brexit as a way-station to a European fiscal union in a smaller but more integrated eurozone. But to halt the march of populist forces rallying against the “tyranny” of Brussels, British advocacy within the E.U. of more liberal economic policies is probably a better antidote, as suggested by Britain’s higher growth rates compared to its European neighbors.
Shared Franco-German-British leadership of the E.U. is also preferable to the more Berlin-centric approach, and which Germans themselves do not want.
Fourth, Britain’s referendum raises questions about how smaller European nations can successfully engage with the big civilization-states of the 21st century. Leaders in both America and China, the reigning superpower and the rising one, publicly urged Britain to stay in the E.U. For China, the U.K. is a gateway to investments in Europe and a financial hub for internationalizing the renminbi.
The “golden decade” in U.K.-China relations promised by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne would be stillborn if Britain severed its access to the European single market.
Britain is America’s closest ally in the E.U. The “special relationship” between Washington and London amplifies the power and influence of both within European councils and in the wider world. A Britain unmoored from the continent is a less obvious top-tier partner for the United States.
British officials should know that Chinese and Indian leaders would have less time for them if they merely represented a set of small islands of 65 million than if they remain embedded at the heart of the world’s largest economy, the European Union.
Fifth, Britain’s referendum raises warnings about how smaller European powers navigate a dangerous geopolitical environment. Brexit would not revoke Britain’s NATO membership. But even the prospect of breaking away from its E.U. partners would not in any way strengthen the alliance.
Russia under Vladimir Putin is pursuing a concerted strategy of dividing the West. Any fracturing of European or transatlantic solidarity creates further openings for Russia to unpick the binding post-Cold War settlement.
China is subverting the liberal international order, using the threat of military force to control the global commons of the South China Sea and building parallel institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as tools of geo-economic influence.
The calamity in Syria has produced a world more awash in refugees than at any time since the World War II, with many of them heading directly for safe havens in Europe.
A Britain exiting the European Union would not have been in a better position to deal with any of these daunting strategic challenges; it would have found itself less able to shape international outcomes or leverage its U.S. and European alliances to reduce threats to its security.
Britain’s voters have spoken. But these broader dynamics remain—the tension between globalization and national identity, the imperative of economic competitiveness in a more multipolar world of diffused technology, the future of a troubled European Union beset by slow growth and populist politics, the imperative for smaller powers to combine their strength to engage with the Indo-Pacific superstates, and the fate of the liberal international order.
Just as America’s Republican voters revolted against their elites by choosing Donald Trump as their party’s nominee, and just as British voters questioned the established European order, so further domestic insurgencies will roil the ranks of the major powers, with potentially widespread strategic and economic consequences for the fragile international system.
Daniel Twining is a director at the German Marshall Fund of the United States who previously lived in the United Kingdom.
