Re:UK votes to leave EU
by sbmassey on Friday June 24, 2016 @12:33AM
(#11966486)
If the EU behaves in that way, given its current state, it will break apart all the more quickly: you need an army to be able to bully your client states into submission.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Sorry that I have to say this, but that's very simplistic.
If two parties agree on any contract or trade agreement, the parties are not always of equal weight and do have their own interests at heart. The UK needs the EU more than the other way around, so the EU has more pull and will make use of it. So "bully your client states into submission" is not a fair description to use, to put it politely. You could say that about any deal where one party has an advantage.
In my opinion, the EU needs the UK more than vice versa: it has spent decades stumbling from failure to failure, both economically and politically, and has very few member states with support strong enough for it to count on. Attempting to punish the UK now would be suicide.
One reason the EU stumbled so much was that there was one large member country that opted out of many of the bigger EU projects. Maybe with the UK gone, it will be easier for the EU to get things done. But it's more likely to lead to a complete disintegration of the EU with more countries leaving.