From rhetoric to reality: US history shows how Brexit will end
There is no need to study the past if the times we live in are unprecedented. We can face the future with childlike optimism, unfettered by experience. Knowledge need not spoil the party.
The UK’s departure from the EU is a first. No country has ever left the Union before. In the coming months, the UK and the EU will negotiate a trade agreement which reduces their commercial, legal and social alignment. Rather than agree on how to converge from two known starting points, negotiators will try to accommodate future divergence of unknown scope. Another first.
In these unique circumstances, Brexit’s proponents urge fellow citizens to look forward to a bright future of their imagining, rather than look back to past experience. That’s good salesmanship. But strip away the surface features of Brexit, the membership of the EU, the jingoistic Rule Britannia language, and what remains is constitutional change. The way Britain is governed, and the rights of its citizens, are being changed. This may be a rare event, but it is not so exceptional that history cannot show us how Brexit will play out.
Exactly 100 years ago, in 1920, the US enacted the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to its Constitution. Each secured the necessary support of a two thirds majority in both houses of Congress and were…
