The Pro-leave campaign was initially fueled by bullish self-confidence: It presented a vision of a Britain poised to resume its rightful place as a world-straddling superpower. Figures like Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson assured voters that, thanks to Britain’s economic might, the E.U. would swiftly fall into line to broker a favorable deal, desperate to ensure that we kept on buying its goods at high volume. We were fed fantastical visions of a buccaneering, neo-imperial nation that would reject complicated entanglements with our European neighbors and reinforce muscular global trade links with states in the former empire. These states, it was assumed, would jump at the chance to rekindle closer economic relations with their former exploiter. [...]
It’s not just that these assertions were unfounded. They showed a fundamental overestimation of Britain’s power and prestige, of its ability to bend other states to its will. The E.U. has not as yet capitulated to a single meaningful demand from a British government that has frequently looked weak and confused. [...]
This lack of realism on behalf of the pro-Brexit camp has been accompanied by a staggering ignorance of the world in which Britain orbits. Over the last 28 months, we have heard a Northern Ireland Secretary admit that, before taking office, she didn’t know that people in the province voted along sectarian lines. We have seen an MP who thought all U.K. citizens were eligible for Irish passports (in fact available only by Irish birth, descent or marriage). This month, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab (who resigned this morning) revealed that he had only recently discovered the importance of the port of Dover—Britain’s main access point to France—for international trade.[...]
But anyone familiar with the brutal way the E.U. has treated Greece since the financial crisis will not see it as an inherently ineffectual organization. It is a union, one whose ability to keep rank in a crisis has proved a painful, surprising lesson to Brexiters in love with the idea of going it alone.
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