Neil Irwin tries to zoom in on the central question no can answer yet about Brexit:
What will a post-E.U. Britain really look like?
The exact process by which the nation will remove itself from the union is murky; it will presumably invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which is a mere 261 words. It isn’t exactly a detailed road map for extricating a country from a complex set of interconnections affecting every facet of economic life. It will take years of arduous negotiations.
One possibility — the benign option, if you want Britain to remain well integrated with Europe — is to model itself on Norway or perhaps Switzerland, two countries that are not part of the E.U. but maintain free trade within the bloc.
The only problem with that: The price of maintaining free access to the rest of the European marketplace for those countries is allowing free migration from E.U. member states and accepting E.U. regulations on businesses. To the degree that pro-Brexit sentiment was driven by British opposition to immigration and regulation, this solution wouldn’t really solve anything.
Britain will get through the immediate financial turbulence and a possible recession just fine. The question for its future is which of two options British leaders now choose. They can maintain the status quo and remain a major international business center (while ignoring the impulse that led voters to choose “leave” in the first place). Or they can become a smaller, more isolated island that is a less important cog in the global economy — but at least one that honors its voters’ wishes.
As Britain – and perhaps other countries – work to extricate themselves from the current form of the EU, there may be another option: A European common market in which all players can operate around the (almost) free movement of goods and services, but without the degree of economic, fiscal, and political integration of today’s EU.
Oh yeah. They did that back in 1957: France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg formed the European Economic Community – also called the Common Market – which the UK joined in 1973 (France vetoed their entry twice before that), along with Ireland and Denmark. Others joined, but in 1993 they screwed up the Common Market with the Maastricht Treaty, establishing the European Union.
My hunch is that Brexit will be the first step in rolling back the EU – and the ‘free movement of people’ provision of the charter – and ultimately replacing it with the Common Market 2.0. There can be a common market without all the immigration fears.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/146418998257
