Europe’s crisis of faith
LONDON IS IN A DAZE. AT THE POSH BARS IN SOHO, AT THE kebab shops on Edgware Road and in the halls of Westminster, conversations circle around the incomprehensible fact that the United Kingdom voted on June 23 to leave the European Union. It seems astonishing how little force it took to rip the fabric of the Western world. No war was needed. No great depression. Just the inchoate resentments of British voters who felt cheated and estranged from the European project. Their anger had festered for years at the fringes of mainstream politics before it erupted in the form of 17 million ballots, all shouting in unison, Out!
The echoes will be heard for years, because while Britain is leaving, all of Europe will have to pay the price. Stock markets plummeted globally, wiping out a record $3 trillion in two days of trading and risking another great recession just as the last one was starting to fade. Across the Continent, populists responded to the Brexit referendum by calling for ones of their own. In Brussels, European leaders convened an emergency summit to try and fend off the contagion. Russia watched from the wings with barely concealed delight. The U.S., already struggling with the West’s receding influence around the world, now has to cope with the departure of its closest ally from the table of E.U. decisionmakers.
For those who abhor the E.U., the news was enough to declare the beginning of the end for Europe as we know it. “I think within 10 years, the European Union will be deconstructed,” Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing National
