Krauthammer’s Take: ‘In Ten Years You Could Have a Britain that Is Only Wales and England’

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hLikZ4RBvnY

Charles Krauthammer argues that the Brexit vote could spell the end of the United Kingdom in its current form: 

This is a problem that began long before the immigration wave. This is a result of what you talked about — the origins of the EU and how the idea, a very utopian idea and successful for a while, as corrupted.

The idea was, after the two world wars, the worst in human history, they wanted to create something … that would ultimately reconcile Germany and France. That was what began the European Coal Commission, which had to do with simply commerce. And it grew to encompass 28 countries. And it succeeded in the sense that, for the first time in a thousand years, the idea of intra-European war was inconceivable. Nobody could even imagine Germany, France, Italy at war against each other.

The problem is that the institution that was created to achieve that — and it was a great achievement — became a bureaucratic monstrosity, which tried to add on to the economic union a political union that the people were never asked for. And when they had the referenda, it was rejected and the EU would go around it.

So it created a super-nationalist institution that suppressed nationalism, which you can only do for so long, and this is the first exit.

But the one thing I think is that those who revel in this — and I understand why the British wanted to do it; it suppressed and supplanted their own democracy, the most venerable in the world — is that I think it will lead to the breakup f the United Kingdom. Apart from the EU, which I think will inevitably not survive as a result of this.

But Scotland wants out because it wants to be in the European Union. And think of Northern Ireland — it took decades to figure that out, to reconcile them, and as of today, for Northern Ireland, you can walk into the Republic of Ireland without a passport. It’s essentially your country. The minute that Britain leaves the EU, that frontier becomes one where you need a passport. The Northern Irish are going to want to secede and join Ireland. We have — I think, in ten years, you could have a Britain that is only Wales and England.

I think those who revel in the recovery of the sovereignty of Great Britain could find that it doesn’t exist in ten years.