Rico's rants: Breaking up is so hard to do

The Washington Post has an article by Rick Noack, who writes about foreign affairs and is based in Europe, about what's next for the EU:

There was no lack of doomsday rhetoric before Britain's referendum on membership in the European Union. European Council President Donald Tusk warned that Britain leaving the European Union could seriously threaten "Western political civilization".
Now, those fears have been stunningly amplified by the decision of British voters to break away. Predictions that the EU could break apart might be a bit far-fetched, but there certainly are other countries where demands for similar referendums could gain momentum.
"The EU's failing. The EU's dying," said UK Independent Party leader Nigel Farage, after Britons voted to leave the European Union. He pinpointed the Netherlands and Denmark as a few of the other countries with growing support to leave the international body.

Sweden
The country views itself as the Scandinavian equivalent of Britain: it refused to introduce the euro as a currency and, in terms of EU politics, Britain and Sweden agree on ninety percent of all issues. Hence, a Brexit would raise particular worries in Sweden. The country accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees last year, but has struggled to integrate some of them. Consequently, Sweden's far right has gained momentum in a development that has reminded some of the rise of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain.
Most Swedes still have a positive impression of the EU. However, this could potentially change if Britain voted "out". In that case, one of the central questions would be whether EU leaders will try to strengthen cohesion by deepening cooperation and focusing on core members, or whether they will loosen the union to allow national governments to have a bigger say. Swedes probably would start to have bigger doubts about whether their voice as a smaller country without the euro would still be heard in Brussels, should the EU continue its integration process.

Denmark
Denmark held a referendum last December, although with a much more limited impact: Danes decided against handing over more powers to the EU. That alone is not enough to predict whether Danes would really want to vote "out". In fact, most citizens of EU member states think that Brussels should not become more powerful than it is, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
As in Sweden's case, two arguments would be particularly likely to influence voter behavior. First, many Danes fear that more immigration or an influx of refugees could threaten the small nation's welfare system. Second, Denmark has, so far, relied on Britain as a strong ally in negotiations with the EU as both countries have had similar policy stances. "Without Britain, Denmark won’t have the locomotive to tow Danish interests,” political scientist Marlene Wind of the University of Copenhagen, quoted by Bloomberg News.

Greece
The Greek government's debt crisis has mostly disappeared from the public debate and the headlines, but it will return sooner rather than later.
Greek newspaper Kathimerini fears that this ongoing crisis combined with a Brexit could ultimately become a threat to Greece's EU membership status.
"Athens’s main concern should be that a victory for Leave will weaken the eurozone’s resolve to bolster Greece’s position within the single currency, which could require more tools and a greater level of integration than currently exists," the paper argued. "In many ways, Greece depends on greater burden sharing in a closer-integrated eurozone. But this would likely remain off the cards after Brexit," Wolfango Piccoli, research director of political risk consulting company Teneo Intelligence, was quoted as saying by the paper.
Hence, what Greece fears most is not an anti-EU referendum influenced by right-wing parties, but rather the EU pushing Greece out in order to save cohesion among the remaining members.

The Netherlands
The Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad had a clear message for the British ahead of Thursday's referendum. "Don't leave me this way," a cover story's headline read. But this may not reflect how most Dutch think about the EU.
Geert Wilders, the head of a right-wing populist party, has supported a Brexit, and hopes for a similar referendum to take place in the Netherlands. "If we want to survive as a nation, we have to stop immigration and stop Islamization," Wilders told the BBC in a recent interview. "We cannot do that inside the European Union," said Wilders, who is is currently leading in the country's polls.

Hungary
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is not known to be a particular friend of the EU, either. In fact, he has gained quite the opposite reputation. Last May, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker greeted Orban by saying, "Hello, dictator", while television cameras were recording the awkward incident.
Despite disagreements, Orban recently urged Britain to remain part of the EU, but he did so most likely because EU-skeptical Britain is an important partner for the Budapest-based government.
Orban is planning to hold a referendum in Hungary that could hurt EU cohesion. After last year's influx of refugees into the country, Hungarians will be asked to decide whether the EU should be allowed to resettle refugees, despite a lack of consent by national parliaments affected by the decision.
In Hungary, it might not be a clear-cut "in or out" referendum about EU membership that could cause trouble but rather a referendum that is designed to indirectly question Brussels' authority.

France
The French are some of the biggest EU skeptics: sixty percent have an unfavorable view of the union. (In comparison, in Hungary, less than forty percent of the population hold a similar opinion.)
Besides Germany, France is continental Europe's driving force. But it also faces a multitude of problems, including a weak economy and a high terrorism threat. Some of the origins of these problems have been blamed on the EU or conditions created by its member states.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for instance, is widely known for her support for austerity measures that were adopted after the last recession. Contrary to Germany, France still has not managed to fully escape high unemployment numbers and weak economic growth. Many French people also watched with disbelief when Merkel opened Germany's borders to Syrian refugees in 2015. This could play into the hands of the right-wing National Front party, which is expected to gain more political power in upcoming elections. The party's leader, Marine Le Pen, has supported Brexit, indicating what could be next for France should her party ever rule the country.

Scotland as a particular case
Britain has had two crucial referendums within only two years, but it might need to prepare for a third one, and potentially Europe's only pro-EU referendum in a long time. Scotland voted to remain part of the United Kingdom in 2014, but the country is mostly pro-European Union.
Considerations to join the EU are only thought experiments at this stage, but they are being conducted surprisingly publicly and in a detailed manner. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, a member of the Scottish National Party, said Scotland will be weighing its options. Asked whether Scotland would really be prepared for another referendum on splitting from the United Kingdom, Sturgeon said that the issue was "definitely on the table".

Rico says at least the Scots may get their long-awaited independence...

Adam Taylor has another Washington Post article on the subject:

Britons love to chuckle at the manner in which America conducts its elections. Why on Earth does the election campaign last two whole years, they ask? What the hell is a caucus, and how is it different from a primary? And an "electoral college"; surely that's made up, right?
The 2016 election has provided plenty of ammo for mockery. You mean one party still has two potential candidates, even though one of them can't possibly win the nomination? And the other party's likely candidate is a former reality television star, with no political experience, who is loathed by much of his own party?
Yes, the British love to chortle at the peculiarities of the American general election. But now Americans have a good reason to fight back. It's called Brexit. Britain's referendum on leaving the European Union touches upon important and real policy debates. Yet even those who strongly supported the calls for a referendum may cringe when they think of what exactly has happened over the past few months. Why exactly? Consider these points:

1. Referendums are extremely rare in Britain. This one was called only to win another vote. Years ago, British Prime Minister David Cameron promised to hold a vote on whether Britain should remain a member of the EU, even though his personal opinion was that leaving would be a mistake.
Cameron did not have to make this decision. Pro-Brexit voices may shout "democracy", but Britain certainly is a parliamentary democracy and the vast majority of elected politicians in Britain support remaining in the EU. Plus, unlike some other countries, Britain does not exactly have a history of referendums. In fact, in the past there have been only two referendums that covered the United Kingdom. One was the vote on membership in the European Economic Community in 1975. In that case, pro-Europe voters won. The other was the 2011 vote on whether to introduce the alternative vote electoral system, a proposal that voters rejected, instead opting to keep the current first-past-the-post system.
But Cameron's decision to call for a referendum was a bid to placate the members of his own party who sought a Brexit vote. These voices weren't a majority, but Cameron was concerned that he couldn't win the 2015 general election without them. So he promised a referendum if he won. Cameron ended up winning the 2015 election by a comfortable margin, calling into question whether he needed to promise a referendum in the first place. Cameron will be forced to resign (and did) if Britain decides to leave the EU.
2. A large majority of experts oppose Brexit, but much of the public doesn't seem to care at all. It's not just politicians who oppose Brexit. A vast array of experts, academics, and organizations have come out to say that they think a British decision to leave the EU would be a disaster. For example, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that the net cost of a Brexit on public finances would be twenty to forty billion pounds.
Yet, as more and more established voices came out against Brexit, polls have shown that support for it actually went up over the past few weeks. Right now, polls suggest an even split between voters, with analysts saying it is too close to call.
The backlash against "experts" may be understandable after the 2008 financial crash, but it's still alarming. “What we’re seeing is a rise in the number of people who are dissatisfied, disapproving, and distrusting of political institutions, political parties, the establishment, the media and, wrapped up with that, the experts,” Joe Twyman, head of political and social research at the polling firm YouGov, told. “A certain proportion of people don’t believe a word of what they hear from those they consider part of the metropolitan elite.”

3. Pro-Brexit politicians who oppose these experts say things like this:
Michael Gove said the pro-EU experts are like the Nazis who told Einstein he was wrong."

4. Meanwhile, anti-Brexit leaders have suggested that it could lead to World War Three or the collapse of Western civilization. Startling rhetoric isn't limited to those in the "leave" campaign. Even Cameron, leading the "remain" campaign, has fallen prey to alarming rhetoric. In one speech in May of 2016, the British prime minister warned that after the horrors of World War Two and the Cold War, the EU had helped prevent war in Europe, and it would be a mistake to think that such a war couldn't happen again. "The European Union has helped reconcile countries which were at each others' throats for decades," Cameron said. "Britain has a fundamental national interest in maintaining common purpose in Europe to avoid future conflict between European countries."
Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, went even further in an interview with the German newspaper Bild, saying that he feared a Brexit would lead not only to the "destruction" of the EU but also "Western political civilization in its entirety". The "leave" campaign has responded bitterly to claims like these, suggesting that they are part of an elitist plot they dub Project Fear.

5. Both sides have been accused of repeatedly lying in their campaigns.
In the fierce campaign ahead of the vote, Britons have been bombarded with facts and statistics from both sides. But both sides have been accused of misleading or sometimes even outright lying to the public. For example, the pro-Brexit camp has repeatedly said that Britain is forced to send a half billion dollars a week to Brussels, even emblazoning it on the side of buses. However, as Sky News' Faisal Islam explained, this wasn't true. "It is demonstrably untrue," Islam wrote. "To put it another way, it is a lie."
The "remain" campaign has also been called out for misleading the public, although it appears to have happened less frequently. The Telegraph recently called claims that two-thirds of British jobs in manufacturing are dependent on demand from Europe "wrong", reporting that they are based on flawed estimates that have since been revised.
6. There is more than one pro-Brexit campaign and sometimes they argue with each other.
Vote Leave, led by the Labour Party's Gisela Stuart, but largely Conservative, leads the official campaign for Britain to leave the EU, but there are two other major unofficial campaigns: Leave.Eu and Grassroots Out. Despite their shared aims, there has been a remarkable degree of infighting among these campaigns, with public disagreements on tactics and policy points. Nigel Farage, a member of Grassroots Out, later said that Vote Leave was led by "cretins."
7. The vote has already led to a flotilla battle on the Thames. Yes, really.
For all the very serious debate about the future of the world, last week the Brexit devolved into two groups of boats squirting each other with water on the Thames.
Farage, leader of the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), had led about thirty fishing boats down the Thames to Britain's Parliament in a bid to show how the country's fishing community had been hurt by EU laws. On the way, he was ambushed by Irish rock star Bob Geldof, who had his own flotilla of EU supporters. The two sets of boats faced off on the Thames, spraying each other with water and attempting to use their sound systems to drown the other one out.
8. A pro-Brexit advertising campaign unwittingly imitated Nazi propaganda.
Last week, Farage released a new advertising campaign that highlighted the EU's problems with immigration. The image in the campaign showed a group of migrants being moved to a refugee camp along the border between Slovenia and Croatia.
However, many Twitter users soon noticed that Farage's ad looked a lot like actual Nazi propaganda that demonized Jews and other minorities in the aftermath of World War One. The advertising campaign seems to provide evidence of what many consider a toxic element in the Brexit debate.
Jo Cox, a recently elected member of Parliament, was stabbed and shot last week while in her constituency in the town of Birstall. Cox, a mother of two, later died from her wounds. Many linked her death to the Brexit debate. Cox was pro-"remain," and she was also a powerful voice for refugees. The man accused of killing her, Tommy Mair, is said to have shouted "Britain first" when attacking her, and has been linked to far-right groups.
9. Electoral rules mean that British television can't air a segment about Brexit from comedian John Oliver. America's favorite British comedian, John Oliver, finally made an attempt to explain the issues with Brexit on his HBO show Last Week Tonight on Sunday. Oliver didn't mince his words, suggesting the "leave" campaign's arguments were "bullshit" and the idea of leaving the EU "kind of insane".
But British television watchers won't be able to watch Oliver's argument until after voting has closed in the referendum. That's because Sky, the television company that usually airs the show on Sundays, says it is bound by British rules for broadcasters during elections. "Sky have complied with the Ofcom broadcasting restrictions at times of elections and referendums that prohibit us showing this section of the program at this moment in time. We will be able to show it once the polls close" on Thursday, a Sky spokesman told Engadget this week.
These rules have existed for a long time: essentially they try to restrict what can be shown on television ahead of a British election so that no one can try to influence the vote. In many ways, that makes sense, although of course the rise of the Internet now means any Brits wanting to watch the Oliver clip could just find it on YouTube:

What concerns some, however, is that it was Sky that decided not to air the Oliver clip. Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media baron who owns a number of British media outlets and is known for his own strong pro-Brexit views.
10. Someone actually thought this pro-Brexit video was a good idea, and it's been viewed more than six hundred thousand times on YouTube.
11. No one really knows what will happen if Britain votes to leave the EU.
This is a big one. When Americans vote in the 2016 elections, they know that they are voting for the next president. The potential outcome of the Brexit referendum is a lot murkier.
If the "remain" campaign is defeated and Britain votes to leave the EU, exactly what happens next is unclear. No country has ever left the EU. It's not totally clear how the process would work, or even how long it would take, though EU regulations suggest two years, but some say it could be more like a decade.
It's hard to imagine what Britain would look like outside the EU and how it would negotiate its new relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. There are a number of models; Britain might try to be like Norway or Iceland and remain in the European Economic Area, or even look to Canada, which recently negotiated a free-trade deal with the EU, but Britain may not be in a position to mimic any of them. European leaders have warned that Britain could be punished for its decision to leave.
This ultimately means that no one really knows what a Brexit would mean. It could be better than many experts predict. It could be worse. As one popular online meme has put it, it's a bit like choosing the unknown contents of a box over a known quantity.
12. People proposed banning old people from voting.
Polls suggest that over-65s are the most pro-Brexit age group, while those under 25 are the least. Given that it could take ten years for Britain to leave the EU, this has led to some morbid logic: for example, that Britain's elderly should not be allowed to vote.
Thankfully, the idea didn't really catch on. Instead, a more reasonable campaign was launched that asked young people to "grab your granny" and persuade her to vote "remain."
13. The vote isn't actually legally binding. After all this, it's worth remembering that the British referendum on leaving the EU is not legally binding. Britain's parliament will still have to pass the laws to make it happen. It's possible that MPs, a majority of whom oppose leaving the EU, could block the moves to leave the EU. Some have warned that if the vote is particularly close, the country will be subjected to the worst possible outcome: another Brexit referendum.