Was Brexit inevitable?
Fabrizio Tassinari
FIESOLE, ITALY — In a short essay published almost 40 years ago, the French author Emmanuel Carrère observed that counterfactual history—imaginative accounts of what might have been—is driven by an abiding sense of intolerance for inevitability. For many in the nineteenth century, for example, it was simply intolerable that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and exiled to Saint Helena. One must rebel against the idea that it could not have been otherwise, Carrère claimed.
Carrère’s argument is newly relevant now that we are marking the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, when a slim majority of voters in the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. To understand how that outcome came about, we need to look back at least another decade, to the heyday of European integration.
Starting in 2004, ten countries, including eight former Communist states, joined the EU in what was the largest expansion in the bloc’s history. The euro had entered circulation two years earlier, and the Schengen system (visa-free travel) had opened borders that previously separated peoples and fueled wars throughout history. For a generation of Europeans, these achievements appeared so natural as to be inevitable. It was a high-water mark for European ambition.
But one can now see, in hindsight, that it was also a moment of peril. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the vulnerability of a shared currency that was not underpinned by a political and fiscal union. Eastern enlargement ran headlong into Russia’s revanchist agenda, which was on full display when President Vladimir Putin ordered his incursions into Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. The new freedom of movement called attention to anxiety-inducing demographic changes—an issue that would come to a head following the failed Arab Spring uprisings and the ensuing refugee crisis in 2015.
This was the context in which the Brexit campaign and referendum unfolded. UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s miscalculation—believing that a referendum would quash his Conservative Party’s Euroskeptic tendency—is well documented. But the conditions that made it possible had been accumulating for more than a decade.
What followed the Brexit vote was a domino effect in which each new global rupture seemed unthinkable until it happened. Donald Trump was elected to the US presidency later that year. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre and the war in Gaza, Trump’s return to the US presidency, and the US-Israeli war against Iran. Each event made the next one less difficult to imagine.
Still, it is worth contemplating what could have happened had British voters decided to remain in the EU—not to indulge nostalgia, but to assess how contingent and accidental some of the ensuing events may have been. Without Britain’s demonstration that a major Western democracy could willingly choose to dismantle the postwar order, Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, might well have had a better chance. And had she prevailed, much would have turned out differently.
For example, a Clinton administration obviously would have managed the pandemic in a more predictable and evidence-based manner. And Putin, deprived of the spectacle of a self-destructing West, might have been deterred from ordering his full-scale invasion.
But these are mere suppositions that can never be confirmed. They also do not counter the argument for inevitability. The same counterfactual approach allows one to argue that the momentous events of the past decade would have happened even if the UK had remained in Europe. After all, the growing distance between America and Europe, like the rise of populism, was not caused by Brexit or Trump. If anything, the ruptures of 2016 were symptoms. The breakdown of the liberal international order reflects deeper structural, economic, cultural, and generational forces. Brexit seemed to happen suddenly, but it was arguably long in the making.
But what does this say about the benevolent determinism that prevailed in Europe a generation ago? Was it a delusion to think that progress toward liberal democracy, peace, and international cooperation was natural and inevitable, given that these noble ideals met their match in the likes of Putin and Trump?
True, counterfactual history also fits well in the autocrats’ playbook. Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine by rewriting history and concluding that the Ukrainian nation never existed. Similarly, on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to rewrite the history of the 2020 election. And in Trump’s second term, alternative history has become a method of government: falsehoods are presented as facts, the outrageous is normalized, and the surreal becomes policy. Far from being an act of rebellion, counterfactual historicizing can serve the exercise of raw power.
But if counterfactual history is motivated by an intolerance for the inevitable, perhaps the lesson of the past ten years is that we must reclaim our own story. It is we who have given up on rebellion—on our own capacity to create positive contingencies—and fatalistically accepted the West’s demise. We could do otherwise.
Fabrizio Tassinari is founding executive director of the European University Institute's School of Transnational Governance and the author of “The Pursuit of Governance: Nordic Dispatches on a New Middle Way” (Agenda Publishing, 2021). This article was distributed by Project Syndicate.