Europe Is Ready to Move On From Brexit

At the end of June 2016, Nigel Farage arrived at the European Parliament in Brussels for one of the most important speeches of his career. Five days earlier, in a stunning electoral upset, Britain had voted to leave the European Union—the first country to do so in the EU’s nearly six decades of history. The leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, feeling his political career had finally been vindicated, took the opportunity to launch a stark warning to his colleagues from across the continent. “What happened last Thursday was a remarkable result,” he said. “It was a seismic result. Not just for British politics, for European politics, but perhaps even for global politics, too.”

Two years later, Britain is still reeling from that institutional earthquake. The political landscape has been radically transformed: David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister who’d called the referendum and campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU, resigned immediately after the humiliating defeat. He was replaced by Theresa May, who subsequently lost her majority in a new general election and has been forced into a political partnership with the Democratic Unionist Party. The British economy has slowed, its growth rates plummeting from the top to near the bottom of the Group of Seven table. Most worrying, the country still lacks a realistic plan for its future relationship with the EU, even though these ties will be crucial in determining Britain’s prosperity and place in the world in the decades to come.