Brexit allows us to celebrate the spirit of governed consent
Stability relies crucially on the experimental dynamism of political, legal, and economic decentralism.
Britain’s Independence Day
The world recently had a rare opportunity to witness a kind of secession: the United Kingdom’s referendum decision to leave the European Union. The grand experiment in centralized planning that is the European Union finds one of its richest and most important member states departing after almost 45 years.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the kind of uniformity and centralization contemplated and offered by the European Union actually makes the continent and the individual member states more unstable. Stability relies crucially on the experimental dynamism of political, legal, and economic decentralism, in which smaller units decide their own destinies, people and resources gravitating to what has been demonstrated to work. Independent nations needn’t join together under a super state in order to trade and cooperate; they will do so because they recognize that it is in their interest.
Prosperity likewise relies on the individual’s ability to opt out of transactions, communities, and even governments—to force these human designs to compete for the people they are supposed to serve. Legal and regulatory uniformity often aggravates the very problems it is meant to solve: harmful and inefficient rules are more far-reaching in their impact, the broad, remote discretion of regulators more susceptible to big business influence.
Without the right and the ability to exit, there can be no true choice and therefore no true friendship or partnership.
Granted that the shockwaves of Brexit may smart in the short term, with the United Kingdom and its people compelled to reassert themselves and their independence in a way that they haven’t needed to for decades. In the long term, though, Britain will be better and stronger: not a mere vassalage of Europe, but the center for trade and innovation it has been for so long. In its trade and immigration policies, Britain will now have the freedom to communicate, negotiate, and trade with the entire world, liberated from the constraints of the EU. Indeed, there is already even talk of Britain dropping the EU-enforced sanctions on Iran.
Britain can be just as much a part of the European civilization as an independent actor, on its own terms, determining its own destiny. As Boris Johnson put it, “We cannot turn our backs on Europe. We are part of Europe.” And indeed, any genuine agreement requires the freedom of each party to enter it and leave it as conscience dictates. Without the right and the ability to exit, there can be no true choice and therefore no true friendship or partnership.
