The Impact of Disintegration Processes in Europe on Brexit

Abstract

The article focuses on the reasons of Brexit that are related to disintegration processes in the European Union, which are caused by crises in Europe, such as the migration crisis, slowing economic growth in the Euro zone, the growing debt crisis in Southern Europe etc. The article also analyzes the impact of some consequences of the European integration on the British decision to leave the European Union. In particular, the article examines deepening the European integration and the gradual transformation of the EU into a union that is increasingly reminiscent of a federal state, as a factor that prompted British Eurosceptics to actively campaign for Brexit. The bureaucracy and the lack of a mechanism for the direct election of the European Commission and other European supranational institutions in Brussels is also examined in the article as one of the factors of Britain’s exit from the EU. The article demonstrates that during Britain’s membership in the European Union, the problem of mass labor migration from the countries of Central-Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom was one more factor that affected the growing Euroscepticism in the country and made the electorate to vote for Breit. The article examines Brexit in the context of the European disintegration processes and compares Britain with some other European countries, which, like the United Kingdom, are quite reluctant to deepen European integration, but unlike Britain are unlikely to consider such a radical step as exit from the EU. The author concludes that the crisis in continental Europe had a decisive influence on Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, although at the same time Brexit would not have happened without the impact of British domestic policy factors. The internal political reasons for Brexit are not discussed in detail in the article, as its main focus is on the foreign policy factors related to Britain’s reaction on the problems of continental Europe, such as the mass labor migration, the policy of supranational European institutions in Brussels, which is not always effective and agreed with London, and economic inequality between the countries of Southern and Central-Eastern Europe and their partners from Northern and Western Europe.