Britain must take the hard lumps of a hard Brexit or crawl back to an EU that is not amused by what has taken place since the referendum
The current state of Brexit in the Parliament at Westminster would be funny if it were not so tragic. Prime Minister Theresa May has clearly failed to create terms, in conjunction with the EU, that would ease Britain out of the Union without a whole lot of pain. At the moment Britain is facing what many call a “hard” Brexit. In other words, a departure from the EU with no guarantees whatever about post-departure trade, commerce, financial and immigration arrangements, nothing.
The European Union is not a federation, as Canada, the United States, Australia and many other countries are. But in this case, it is acting like a federation would act if one part of that federation decided to leave. In U.S. history, southern secession brought on a long and very bloody civil war. President Abraham Lincoln believed that the very bedrock of American democracy was at stake because the majority of the people of the United States did not want their country to be divided.
The Quebec separatists never seemed to understand that if Canada reached an easy agreement with an independent Quebec, it would pose a very bad example for what might happen if, say, British Columbia decided that it too wanted some form of sovereignty-association with the shrinking “rest of Canada.” We saw the consequences of that after the global financial meltdown of 2008. But even with all the bad blood that ensued, the EU stayed together. Why? Because by the late 2000s the ties that bound the EU together since its founding in 1993 had grown to the point where the national interest of its member countries outstripped the individual interests of each of its member countries.
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