The results are in, and Britain has decided to leave the European Union. The question is, what happens next for all parties effected?
For the European Union, the world will keep spinning, and they will continue their work. Any problems, economic, or otherwise, will undoubtedly be blamed on this secession. The EU can swiftly blame their problems on Britain, even though the they have been seeing much larger problems that are bound to compound to inevitable fall outs.
For Britain, this could be a great step towards freedom. They could be a leading example in the idea of self-ownership and the empowerment of individual rights. They could break down barriers to free trade, create an economic environment based around the rights of the individual, and countless other ways to ensure freedom and prosperity for its people. That would seem like a well needed change. The unfortunate thing is that this does not seem to be the reason for their exit.
What we hear instead of cries for freedom, are cries for isolationism, cries of nationalism, and the unfortunate paranoia of a people based on religion. What we see is a call for immigration control and other isolationist policies that usually effect the poorest and most vulnerable in a society. Instead of decentralizing themselves from one power, and looking to take that further, they seem to want to put all of their chips in the basket of the British Parliament. What they are doing is taking a step back from freedom it would seem. The people, fueled by the fears of radical Muslims, are advocating for anything but peace and freedom. Luckily they are surrounded mostly by water and wouldn't have to build a wall costing its citizens untold amounts of money. But what does this do? It empowers this sense of nationalism, that you have the right to deny people the right to immigrate. It creates this atmosphere of intolerance and hostility towards a certain group for nothing more than something as trivial as religion. We see it happening at home in the United States as well. The actions of a few somehow justify the oppression of everyone.
I do not see this reducing the violence that immigrants cause, rather this trumped up nationalism will breed a whole new, old rather, sentiment of intolerance and a motivation to “protect the motherland”. Brits, do you really want to lead the way in isolationism and intolerance? Wouldn't you rather be an example of acceptance, tolerance, and freedom? Why not try to solve your immigration problems in other ways? Maybe talk to the US and the UN and stop all of the chaos and destruction we cause in the Middle East that spreads hate and its vehicle (people) all over the world. Maybe its not a radical religion, rather a group that has had their homeland torn apart and are motivated by that to cause violence within your borders. If you do not destroy a society, you will not displace those in that society. You will not create this hostility that motivates people to be violent towards others because violence is a hard thing to motivate. People didn't fly planes into buildings on 9/11 because of their religious intolerance. They did it because they were striking back against those who were attacking them. Instead of creating more and more of this hostility and closing your borders to the problems it creates, maybe we should look at a way to reduce this hostility. Most people don't want to resort to violence just because they disagree with others. There has to be other motivations. Breeding intolerance is not a way to stop violence, it sounds like it is more likely to create violence.
What we should hope is for the decentralization of power to continue down to the most proper level, the individual. That may seem like a pipe dream. It seems that Britain will head down a darker path. One fueled by hate, fear and ignorance. What we will see is the EU and Britain blaming each other for their problems and most likely never actually addressing them. We'll see more lack of representation on the part of Parliament and the people will feel the same way about the new monster as they did the old.
When you have a small group of people in charge of a much larger one you will never have peace among the people. There will always be people that will disagree, for good reasons and bad alike. We should aim to secede and decentralize authority down to where the authority will represent all of its people. What that would look like would be every man and woman having authority over themselves. No other authority can lay blanket laws and rules and expect everyone to agree. We have to continue to decentralize, not dig ourselves deeper into these collectivist idea that we are better than another for some arbitrary shared characteristic. We should look to encourage the idea individual rights and decentralization of government. But what will Britain do? Will they forge the roads of progress, or will the burn all their bridges and create Donald Trump's utopia? I guess we shall see, but the odds for freedom, acceptance, and tolerance look bleak. But, we can only advocate so much. It is up the people of Britain to make their voices heard. Be an example of acceptance in this time of change, don't fall back to a time of intolerance.
