The Pros And Cons Of The UK Leaving The European Union

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Cameron succeeded in getting a new deal on the UK membership of the European Union, but the decision whether to leave was up to the citizens and thereby leaving the government without much control. The exit of the UK seems to challenge the idea of “integration” and brings the concept of disintegration into the picture, which Liberal Intergovernmentalism then would have to be able to account for. Due to the scope of this paper I will only briefly touch upon disintegration and how Liberal Intergovernmentalism deals with UK’s divorce with the European Union.
According to Ben Rosamond (2016), UK leaving the European Union has provoked speculations about a possible disintegration of Europe (Rosamond, 2016: 865). Most scholars have been engaged …show more content…

The British people rely on the EU in terms of stabilising trade, investments, travel, litigation, national security and political values (Moravcsik, 2016). Whether Brexit then should be seen as the first real example of disintegration in the EU is still hard to say as the negotiation-process on the terms of leaving and the future relationship between the European Union and the UK is still not clear. But still, why leave if the government did not want to? One could argue the decision to leave was not really a government decision. The preference of the UK government was to stay in the European Union, whereas Brexit registered a societal preference to leave. Liberal Intergovernmentalism should then however also have to be able to account for this societal preference which is not entirely economic rational and might also be linked to issues of identity, culture and maybe even irrationality. Arguments made by Euro-sceptics pull threads between e.g. EU, migration, economy and identity which then only partly seem to fit within the framework of Liberal Intergovernmentalism. However, according to Moravcsik’s 1993 article, “EC institutions have been deliberately designed to assist national governments in overcoming

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