Pat Buchanan – Some of us have long predicted the breakup of the European Union. The Cousins appear to have just delivered the coup de grace.
While Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, England voted for independence. These people, with their unique history, language and culture, want to write their own laws and rule themselves.
The English wish to remain who they are, and they do not want their country to become, in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, “a polyglot boarding house” for the world.
From patriots of all nations, congratulations are in order.
It will all begin to unravel now, over there, and soon over here.
Across Europe, tribalism, of all strains, is resurgent. Not only does the EU appear to be breaking up, countries appear about to break up.
Scotland will seek a second referendum to leave the U.K. The French National Front of Marine Le Pen and the Dutch Party for Freedom both want out of the EU. As Scots seek to secede from the U.K., Catalonia seeks to secede from Spain, Veneto from Italy, and Flemish nationalists from Belgium.
Ethnonationalism seems everywhere ascendant. Yet, looking back in history, is this not the way the world has been going for some centuries now?
The disintegration of the EU into its component nations would follow, as Vladimir Putin helpfully points out, the dissolution of the USSR into 15 nations, and the breakup of Yugoslavia into seven.
Czechoslovakia lately split in two. The Donbass seeks to secede from Ukraine. Is that so different from Transnistria splitting off from Romania, Abkhazia and South Ossetia seceding from Georgia, and Chechnya seeking separation from Russia?
After World War II came the disintegration of the French and British empires and birth of dozens of new nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. America returned the Philippine islands to their people.