Britain’s uncertain Brexit march

The popular vote of the UK on 23 June 2016 to leave the EU has been politically an earthquake for the first and a shock to the second. Retrospectively, the outcome was likely, given the structural factors both within Britain and between Britain and the EU. Yet these same factors have obstructed a clear British postreferendum strategy for secession: Britain does not know what kind of Brexit it wants, or whether it wants one at all. This briefing will examine the causes of the Brexit revolution and the reasons for its uncertain execution, before considering the likely outcome.

Britain’s relationship to Europe is traditionally ambiguous. Britain’s identity – of a Protestant island-state formed in 1707 from the AngloScottish union – was cemented during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in wars against the Catholic powers of continental Europe. It was successively reinforced by Napoleon’s anti-British Continental System; by nineteenth-century imperial ‘splendid isolation’; and by Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’ in 1940, standing alone against Nazi-dominated Europe. But to maintain the European balance of power, Britain had to be closely involved in Europe’s politics. When Britain became too detached from Europe, as during the American Revolution and the Boer War, it found itself in peril.

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Being Serb the Bosnian way: Rodoljub Colakovic

I reached my homeland, in Bosnia, whom I love as it is possible to love only a mother. I love her for her gentleness, her sombreness, wild beauty, for her soft and warm songs, for her pain and suffering yesterday and still today. I love her for her rebelliousness and her struggles, for her proud sons who languish and die in the dungeons and fortresses of two great empires and two small kingdoms: from Asia Minor through Požarevac, Arad and Teresienstadt to Zenica, Sremska Mitrovica and Lepoglava. Among them were various people: archimandrites and metal-workers; long-moustached Franciscans and clean-shaven gymnasium students; the descendants of old Bosnian landowning houses and the sons of serfs; coarse and illiterate people and educated heads who managed to “write little books”. But in all of them burned the same flame: all of them loved our Bosnia, and all of them not only passionately desired, but fought and died so that her children should have more freedom, more bread and more justice.

Rodoljub Čolaković, Bosnian Serb from Bijeljina, Bosnian Partisan leader, Spanish Civil War vet, political secretary of the Bosnian Communist organisation in 1943, first prime minister of the People’s Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1945, writing in 1941, on the eve of Yugoslavia’s entry into World War II (Rodoljub Čolaković, Kuća oplakana, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1966, p. 307).