CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

There is No Going Back: How Democracies Can Begin Again

Anti-Brexit protesters in Manchester. Photo: Robert Mandel, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0

The tenth anniversary of the British vote to leave the European Union raises two immediate questions: Was it worth it? Can it be undone? The answer to the first is increasingly clear. Experts generally agree that the British economy has suffered for a decade, accompanied by political instability. The second question is more complex. Democracies are built on the assumption that citizens can change their minds. Elect a new government. Hold another referendum. Reverse course. But can a nation ever truly return to where it was before a fateful decision?

Philip Stephens described the “dismal verdict” about Brexit ten years after in the New York Times: “A decade later, the cost of that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty — is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The ‘sunlit meadows’ were a mirage.”

In 2016, Britain voted 51.9% to 48.1% to leave the European Union. Ten years later, opinion has reversed. Most polls now show that, if given another referendum, a majority of Britons would vote to rejoin the EU.

Can Brexit be undone? Would rejoining restore Britain to its pre-Brexit condition? The answer depends on a distinction we do not often make: reversing a decision is not the same as restoring the world that existed before it.

Brexit is not unique. Democracies—and great powers in particular—repeatedly confront decisions that later generations wish they could reverse. Brexit is only the latest example of a larger historical puzzle. Every generation seems to have its irreversible moment—the event that........

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