Iron And Clay: Brexit Highlights Key Challenges Of EU

Brexit's Message to European Union

• The first problem with the EU is that, though it is called a union, it isn't really one. The EU is essentially an economic club; not a state.
  
  
• Brexit has highlighted the key challenges that the EU faces. The first challenge concerns a widespread overestimation of the EU's role. This is due to its perception as a supra-national state, which it certainly is not.
  
  
• The EU is also facing the challenge posed by the return of the nation-state as the most popular model of socio-political organization across the globe. Right now all supra-national and/or international organizations, from the United Nations to NATO, are regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, not only in Europe but also throughout the world.
  
  
  
  
  It is a wonder that the EU has managed to bring together so many nations in a region that has the longest and most intense history of national rivalries and enmities compared to any other region in the world. Part of that success was due to fears fomented by the Cold War and hopes risen after the fall of the Soviet Empire.
  
  
  Brexit has highlighted the key challenges that the EU faces. The first challenge concerns a widespread overestimation of the EU's role. This is due to its perception as a supra-national state which it certainly is not. Local politicians in many member states like to blame the EU for their own failings even in domains that do not concern the union.
  
  
  The EU is also facing the challenge posed by the return of the nation-state as the most popular model of socio-political organization across the globe. Right now all supra-national and/or international organizations, from the United Nations to NATO, are regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, not only in Europe but also throughout the world.
  
  
  EU leaders and those who support it would do well to offer a more modest and realistic image of the union as an economic club concerned with just certain aspects of its members' economies and not as a putative "United States of Europe."
  
  
  The EU has been pretending to be a machine trying to impose uniformity on nations that have always prided themselves in their specificity. It may survive and even prosper if it works for unity in diversity.