If Europe were a democracy, all of its citizens would
have had a say in whether the United Kingdom leaves or remains in the
European Union. After all, it is not the just the fate of the British
that Brexit would affect, but also the quality and longevity of the entire European project.
The EU, as it turns 65, is showing grave sclerosis, and
voices—nationalist, populist, and sometimes xenophobic—are calling for
its dissolution. The moment has thus come, if it has not already passed,
to prune the dead wood of the tree to save the trunk.

The
European Union’s original mission was more political than economic, as
were its greatest successes. The union was designed to put an end to
perpetual conflict between France and Germany. It succeeded, ending a millennium of intra-European wars
in the process. The union also brilliantly helped Eastern European
countries quickly transition from decades of Russian tutelage following
the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In parallel to the political
project, over the decades, Europeans created an integrated economic
space, culminating in the adoption of a single currency at the turn of the millennium.

The
problem is that, over time, the economic dimension of the European
project has overtaken its political and cultural aspects. Losing sight
of all that Europe could be, the poorest regions and members came to see
the union as a giant ATM. The richest believed it to be a money pit for
their taxes. The United Kingdom, more than anyone else, has been aware
of those tensions and has exploited them since the days of Margaret
Thatcher. By doing so, it has reinforced public perceptions that
membership in the union is a zero-sum game, especially when money is
tight.

The United Kingdom’s position in Europe
was always uncomfortable. During the 1960s, its accession to the common
market was repeatedly vetoed by French President Charles de Gaulle,
who denounced London as a Trojan horse for Washington’s interference.
In reality, de Gaulle feared that British membership would dilute Paris’
influence. The Europe he envisioned was built around a Franco-German
axis dominated by France, if only because of all the restrictions
imposed on Germany after WWII. But with de Gaulle out of power,
membership came for the United Kingdom in 1973, and with it came the
triangular relationship that the French and Germans finally accepted
with relief. Germany dreaded France’s excessive ambitions, including
breaking away from NATO’s
unified command and embarking on grandiose industrial projects—one of
which, the Airbus Group, owes its ultimate success to German realism. As
for France, the recession of 1973 marked the beginning of continuous
economic decline in relation to Germany, which also became
demographically dominant when its eastern and western halves reunified
in 1990. When it needed to, Paris could ally with London to stand up to
Bonn—later Berlin—as it did recently in the war in Libya.

Throughout,
the United Kingdom remained a marginal partner, but the price it
exacted for its arbitrage was exorbitant, including exemptions from
membership rules—the United Kingdom stayed out of Schengen, out of the
euro—and financial concessions to boot—the infamous British rebate on
dues, negotiated by Margaret Thatcher, that has applied every year since
1985. In the process, London’s approach to Europe scuttled any momentum
toward federalism, turning a project that aspired to strong political
union into nothing more than an ever-enlarging free market.

Brexit could be the best thing for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall

The United Kingdom was not alone in exploiting the
situation, and this is where the case for Brexit echoes last year’s case
for Grexit. Greece, an underdeveloped country that joined the EU in
1981, has used the union foremost as a source of foreign aid and, when
the euro was adopted, of almost free loans guaranteed by the union’s
richer members. It was a flagrant abuse of the spirit of the union, but
Greece was economically marginal. Its profligacy went unremarked until
the global economic meltdown that began in 2007.

Even
then, ever opposed to Grexit, the union decided to throw good money
after bad rather than set a precedent for departure from the eurozone.
Eurocrats have met Brexit with the same anxiety, handing British Prime
Minister David Cameron yet more special treatment for the United
Kingdom—only in Britain would recent EU migrants be denied access to
welfare and other benefits—and put yet more nails in the federalist
coffin. The hope was that those concessions, coupled with a massive
campaign of economic fearmongering, into which the IMF and even U.S. President Barack Obama were drafted, would sway British voters to stay in the union.

Whether those efforts have paid off will become apparent on June 23, when voters across the United Kingdom go to the polls.
The British, who have stymied Europe for decades, now have a chance to
set it free. If anything, the Greek crisis has shown that greater
federalism is the only way forward for Europe, because monetary
decisions related to the euro should be backed up by fiscal policies,
which should be approved by union-wide democratic consultation. In some
respects, the EU looks a lot like the United States, with some areas of
productive brilliance—Silicon Valley, which is akin to Germany’s Mittelstand—subsidizing
deadbeats elsewhere. But the United States, for all its local
particularism, is still a country with a nation that accepts that taxes
from California will pay for public schools in Mississippi. It is that
redistributive logic that makes a commonwealth and that, in Europe, the
Greeks have abused and the British have denied. And this is why Europe would be better off without them.