I wrote on Brexit for Politico today:
Britain should be ruled by Britain.
This is the proposition that is ultimately at stake in the so-called Brexit referendum. British voters will decide this week whether to leave or remain in the European Union, a truly pivotal moment in the history of our closest ally and — more broadly — of the nation-state
Britain has given us such landmarks of accountable government as the Magna Carta and foundational thinkers on the road to democratic rule as John Locke, Algernon Sidney and John Milton. It resisted centralizing monarchs in the turbulence of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution and defeated continental threats to its sovereignty emanating from Spain (King Phillip II), France (Napoleon) and Germany (Hitler).
If what Shakespeare deemed this fortress built by Nature for herself, this precious stone set in a silver sea, is content to live with the surrender of a large share of its sovereignty to EU technocrats, it will be a blow to self-government in its ancestral home.
The Brexit vote coincides with a rising nationalism in the rest of the Europe and here in the United States, exemplified by Donald Trump. There is chaff among the wheat, but the instinct to defend the nation-state — as the best vehicle for democratic accountability and for the protection of its citizens — is necessary and sound.