Britain’s historic referendum result doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the European Union, but it will certainly force the EU to change, experts say.
Ian Lee of Carleton University predicts that the EU will stay intact – Britain included -- but will become a “looser federation” that looks more like Canada.
Lee told CTV News Channel that those predicting “doom and gloom and recessions and so forth are making a fatal mistake.”
“The biggest loser last night was the bureaucracy in Brussels,” he said, referring to the European Parliament and related institutions based in the Belgian capital.
Lee said that people will look back in a few years and see Thursday’s vote as “the catalytic event that caused transformation in the EU structure.”
“I think they’re going to evolve and restructure towards a much looser confederation where the individual powers like Germany and the U.K. will be much stronger,” he said.
“In fact, it’s going to look a lot more like Canada, where we have a strong central government but yes, strong provincial governments – except over there they will be called states: France, Germany, Italy etc.”
“It will be much stronger and they will end the meddling of Brussels, who many in Europe see as an unaccountable bunch of bureaucrats,” Lee added.
Philip Giurlando, a political scientist from Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., told CTV News Channel that, although anti-immigrant sentiment many have tipped the scales in favour of “leave,” many Brits opted out of the EU simply because “they are convinced that they are tied to this dysfunctional body.”
He points to a weak response to the migrant crisis and the economic collapse in Greece as examples of recent EU dysfunction.
But he doesn’t see this as the end either.
A recent poll shows 48 per cent of Italians, 41 per cent of French citizens and 34 per cent of Germans would vote to exit the EU if given the chance. But Giurlando points out that referenda in those countries will only happen if voters choose anti-EU parties such as France’s National Front, in elections over the next few years. Polls so far suggest that’s unlikely.
And while he believes citizens of those countries would “probably” vote to leave today, European leaders have plenty of time to “address the dysfunctional aspects of the EU, and in that case, more voters would be willing to stay.”
Richelle Harrison Plesse, a French journalist, told CTV News Channel that, while the ‘Brexit’ has “given a boost to Euroskeptic far-right parties,” she points out that “almost half of those in the U.K. did vote to remain.”
