Posted by Mark on 11 Jan, 2017
Should a personal blog start with politics? Maybe :-) The last year has been very turbulent regarding international politics. Be it Middle East wars, US elections, or the demise of democracy in Poland - it's been bad news all around, most of which was unexpected, at least to me.
The only thing that could have been anticipated, though, was the Brexit.
To be honest, I really didn't think this would happen. But in fact, during spring, I jokingly told several friends, that a Brexit vote might be "funny and good for Europe."
Everyone seems to complain about European bureaucracy, where in fact it makes a lot of things easier: No pressing need to research trustworthy product quality labels as a comparably high standard is already defined by EU law. Compare prices across countries when doing online shopping: because of standards for how to display taxes and because of minimum standards for customer protection, it's easy to do. Many countries even have the Euro that makes EU-international shopping easy (this one does not apply to the British though, as they have never experienced the full benefits but shared a lot of the undesired consequences).
But as long as no country ever left the EU, no-one would personally experience the actual benefits of being a long-time part of the union. I imagined that a Brexit would make the perfect example.
Travelling Europe, I've learned to love people and places and wherever I went, I found things that where better than at home, new ideas I could learn from, interesting view points that I didn't see before. I can say that I really like globalization for these insights. And Britain is a good example for this: politeness, openminded and friendly people, humour, and a lack of Besserwisserei is what I found. If we could make Europe a little more British in this regard, it would be beneficial to all. Now, especially as I expect a drastically negative outcome, how could I wish - even jokingly - that a Brexit ever happened? The simple answer is that I don't think there are many economies that would survive exiting the EU, but the UK would. Also, since the British have always appeared pragmatic and rational to me, I would expect a clear change of the public opinion and thus an early correction of the political path, independent of the political party in charge at the time.
Until now, everything is theory, but the dice have been thrown. If all goes well, we will see enough impact on UK economic factors before any Brexit plans have really been put into operation to turn the sentiment. Ideally, we would even see a broad movement towards a real European Union, with enough momentum to correct its (undisputedly existing) flaws together.