Britain has voted to withdraw from the European Union. This is a victory. For European populists. For Putin's Russia. As well as for the new world system of governance, what Victor Orban has called “illiberal democracy.” The era of the modern West, in the form that emerged out of the ashes of the WWII, is coming to an end. The West alone is to be blamed for that. As it has been hit by one crisis after the other, the West has continued to merely scratch the surface in looking for ad hoc, immediate, and almost exclusively economic solutions. The emphasis is always on the symptoms but never on the disease. In so doing, the West has turned a blind eye on a process of deep, internal transformation. The post-Brexit debate that will ensue in the following days and months will most likely stay faithful to this legacy. The discussion will remain superficial, preoccupied with economic and political questions, limited to the short-term quests of reorganizing the EU in pursuit of its long-term viability. But I want to insist that the challenge is much bigger than the future of the EU. It is about the preservation of the West, understood here as a synonym for liberal democracy and the commitment to the rule of law. We are confronted with the difficult—even terrifying question: How are we to build a new modernity on the debris of the modern post-war West in order to avoid repeating the bitter historical experiences of the pre-war Europe.

What does Brexit mean for the European Union? One can try to predict the consequences, but one can also ask what messages the vote reveals, what it tells us about the state of integration. Is Europe a market, a project of identity-building, or one of political integration? What does Brexit tell us about each of these?

The world of EU law woke-up on June 24th with a hangover. Every member of our academic community is or knows well friends and colleagues studying and teaching EU law in the UK whose futures are in question. Yet, the referendum raises a larger scientific question for EU law. As well as the technicalities of divorce and variable geometry that will deservedly receive renewed attention, there is the broader question about the kind of political reshaping of EU constitutionalism that Brexit will bring about.

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016, the question of migration has been at the forefront of attempts to understand what happened, and in particular why working class communities in many of the regions of England, and in parts of Wales, voted predominantly for the Leave side. Polling data show a weak correlation between areas of the country that voted for Leave and high levels of inward migration from the rest of the EU. The link between immigration and Brexit is very clear in East Anglian agricultural towns like Boston and Wisbech, but otherwise is weak. South Wales and the North East of England, which also saw clear majorities for Leave, are not areas of high EU migration. Instead, they are regions that have experienced successive waves of deindustrialisation since the 1980s. The overriding issue raised by the Brexit vote, in my view, is not migration as such (although that is part of the story), but a wider phenomenon of deepening economic insecurity, and the dangerous political dynamic it has created.

The (still) United Kingdom has voted against remaining in the EU. The divide between London City and the countryside, between young and old, between Scotland and Wales –all of this will keep this nation occupied for a long time, if it does not tear the nation apart. At the very least it will be a nation under significant tension. But what about the Continent? Recently a truculent suggestion has been making the rounds in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. In principle it would be a good thing if the English leave. This would clear the way for “more Europe.” Maybe, with a divorce, Europe will at last be free to take step toward a federal state. Some, a bit more tactfully, wonder if Brexit should not have consequences for the EU as well. Should the EU become more “social” with decidedly more transfers? Or, should competences now be returned to the Member States? Others, to the contrary, have floated the idea of a new subsidiary balance: they want to transfer additional sovereign authority and reduce the veto-opportunities for the Member States.

400 years after Shakespeare's death, a tragedy of Shakespearian dimensions has unfolded in the United Kingdom: Brexit. One Friday morning in June 2016, staring in disbelief at the incoming news, we were asking ourselves: “Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream.” A look at Shakespeare's work in the context of Brexit is no lofty, purpose-free exercise. For one, Shakespeare's work is instructive for explaining British national pride, its indulgence in splendid isolation that obviously provided one of the intellectual undercurrents of the Leave campaign (though the causes for voting Leave are, of course, a lot more multifaceted). The English nation formed itself in the Elizabethan age against the background of a century of quarrels with France in what was then the recent past. The pride that the British took from their victories is nowhere better reflected than in Henry V's Crispin's day speech. A small number of English soldiers heroically resisted the French forces. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Shakespeare infused the play with a feeling of togetherness based on England's victorious fight against continental powers. It was this idea of nationhood that carried England and the whole of the United Kingdom successfully through the turmoil of the 20th century. Small wonder that some demanded compelling (economic) reasons to continue bonding with the continent.

The British want to leave the EU and the rest of Europe is shocked. The Europeans may have lost their faith in their common destiny. The large number of strong arguments for a membership in the Union did not convince the majority of the British voters, although those arguments have been clearly demonstrated again and again. Many political fields cannot be ploughed unilaterally. Environmental protection is a global challenge. The tough competition prevalent in the global economy will not be suspended by referendums of ageing, wealth-saturated European societies. The single European market is more resilient against global competitive pressure than an array of small domestic economies on their own. All these reasons do not seem to pervade. EU- opponents see the membership of their country as an act of self-enslavement and the Brexit as a new biblical Exodus incident. Boris Johnson – a modern Moses? The construction of Europe in this perspective is no longer a rational calculation but turns into a question of faith and it congeals into political theology.

Back in 2007, the year during which, alongside others, Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union (in January) and the world financial crisis began with the French global investment bank BNP Paribas terminating withdrawals from several sub-prime loaded hedge funds (in August), Perry Anderson concluded a London Review of Books essay entitled, “Depicting Europe,” with words that today must be seen as prophetic: “the long-run outcome of [European] integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zigzag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.” The narrow but decisive vote by the UK electorate on June 23 to “take their country back” represents just the latest, and arguably biggest, shock in what can only be described as a decade of seismic activity for the European project. Indeed, it is hard to believe in post-Brexit 2016 that only a little more than a decade ago, in 2004, Jeremy Rifkin could proclaim the “European Dream […] a beacon of light in a troubled world,” beckoning, as it were, “a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth.” Such lofty words must sound no less than ludicrous to the sober and cynical minds of contemporary Europeans who see seemingly entrenched post-War realities, many having to do with European integration, assailed head on. What makes this (again seemingly) dramatic change yet harder to digest is, of course, the fact that much of the damage is self-inflicted. It is decidedly not the same as some external oil-price shock to which an otherwise well-governed and self-conscious incipient political community has suddenly been exposed. Instead, the Brexit vote symbolizes more starkly than anything else the deep crisis that has been building up within the European project for a much longer time than its proponents would wish to admit.

Prior to Britain's popular referendum on whether to remain a member of the European Union, parts of the public in Britain and other European states had already expressed a great range of emotions concerning on-going negotations between the European Union and the United States regarding the bi-lateral Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, more commonly referred to as “TTIP.” In February 2013, the European Commission optimistically projected that TTIP “would be the biggest bilateral trade-deal ever negotiated,” with the potential to “add 0.5% to the EU's annual economic output.” Most notably, TTIP seeks to streamline administrative rules and technical product standards in order to remove trade barriers, and aims to “achieve ambitious outcomes” across three broader areas—(a) market access, (b) regulatory issues and non-tariff barriers, and (c) rules, principles, and new modes of cooperation to address shared global trade challenges and opportunities.

Factortame (Case C-213/89 [1990] ECR I-2433, starting in 1988, ff.) was the case that Eurosceptics felt doomed UK parliamentary sovereignty. Factortame said that, having committed itself to the treaty, a Member State could not then contradict the treaty with contrary domestic action. Specifically, no discrimination against nationality (now TFEU Art. 18) has been permitted since the beginning. Nevertheless, parliament amended the Merchant Shipping Act in 1988 to prevent Spanish fishermen from catching fish in UK waters by requiring, for example, that 75% of the shares in a fishing enterprise must owned by people domiciled and residing in UK. The diehards never accepted that parliament had to exercise its authority within the framework established by the treaty.

Philip Jessup would not be pleased. Exactly sixty years after he published his groundbreaking book on Transnational Law, a majority of voters in the United Kingdom decided they wanted none of that. By voting for the UK to leave the European Union, they rejected what may well be called the biggest and most promising project of transnational law. Indeed, the European Union (including its predecessor, the European Economic Community), is nearly as old Jessup's book. Both are products of the same time. That invites speculation that goes beyond the immediate effects of Brexit: Is the time of transnational law over? Or can transnational law be renewed and revived?

In an essay from 1998 the comparative law scholar Pierre Legrand asked the question “are civilians educable?” It was a theme that had preoccupied him for some years as he agonized over what he regarded as the intolerant, totalizing, and normalizing manner in which civilian legal systems and their acolytes encounter other legal traditions. He had documented, for example, the ways in which Quebec's new 1994 Civil Code constructively sought to suppress and exclude the significant and historically relevant Anglophone community in Quebec. Legrand argued that this domineering posture is a product of the civil law's cosmological and autarkic mentality. “The difficulty,” Legrand lamented, “is that the civil law mind … is reflexively imperialistic … because of its penchant for universalization.” Far more than his disquiet over the precarious future of Quebec's Anglophone community, Legrand came to be concerned about the fate of the English common law tradition in the face of the European Union's convergence agenda. This was, to Legrand's mind, an apocalyptic confrontation between England's still-proud legal culture and Europe's horsemen of convergence: the ECJ, the Commission, the Parliament. With increasing distress Legrand turned his attention to the way in which the European Community (and later the Union) “is liable to achieve … the marginalization of one of the subcultures that have defined western Europe historically.” He would go on to insist that “European legal systems are not converging” and to raise ever-more strident objections to the idea of a European civil code. This would not cease until Legrand had written “Antivonbar,” an incendiary manifesto aimed at salvaging the English common law from what he viewed as the Union's closed-fisted and violent politics of supremacy, which had taken the form of the proposed European Civil Code.

Eurosceptics of all kind feel vindicated by the Brexit. However, their reasons do not only differ, they are actually inconsistent: For leftists like the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras the vote expresses the failure of a socially unjust political order devoted to austerity and market liberalism. Considering the anti-regulatory bias of the Leave campaign and the strict austerity policy of the newly re-elected conservative majority, this seems like a rather paternalistic interpretation. Many on the left-wingers refuse to accept that there are democratic majorities for inequality. They prefer to treat the voters as the victims of a wrong consciousness instilled by politics or the media.

The financial services industry is of central importance to the UK economy. It represents some 7% of GDP. It also generates major exports for the UK - in the region of one-third of UK financial services are exported to the EU. News reports in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result included the sharp drop in banking stocks; the overtures being made to attract UK financial business away from the City to other EU centres; and plans by leading financial institutions to move some operations away from the City. Vivid illustrations all of the importance of the Brexit vote for the City and the UK financial services industry.

According the Office for National Statistics' 2014 estimate, 300,000 UK residents were born in Germany and 131,000 are German nationals. This makes them the fifth biggest group of immigrants in the UK by country of birth—preceded only by people born in India, Poland, Pakistan and the Republic of Ireland— and the twelfth largest group of immigrants in terms of nationality. Thus, although Brexit's rhetoric against immigration has not directly targeted Germans, a large number will be affected by the UK's changing relationship with the EU. Just as for other EU citizens, their future status in the UK is all but certain.

Some events seem to be outside the scope of political imagination, even if they are not improbable. That the United Kingdom, one of the European Union's (EU) largest and politically most influential Member States, might leave the EU, is one of these events. The outcome of the referendum of June 23, 2016 has evoked surprise and notions of doom. “Catastrophe”, “explosion of a bomb”, “drama,” are only some of the terms used by politicians and media observers to express their surprise and to signal that they are overwhelmed by the outcome. Reactions in the immediate aftermath of the referendum were uncoordinated, conflicting, and did not show a strong spirit of European integration. For example, it is not self-evident why the foreign ministers of the six founding Member States should gather to strategize over the response to the referendum, thus effectively excluding the 21 other Member States.

It is common to describe the European Union as “new,” “unique,” “sui generis,” and hard to fit into existing categories of institutional arrangements, national or international. Indeed, debates on how to describe the EU are often lively and sometimes illuminating. In concrete terms, however, one of the best ways to understand the EU's distinction from other forms of treaty-based trade and integration regimes is the EU's distinctive lack of unilateral safeguard and escape valve mechanisms available to policy-makers in the various Member States.

The European Union stands for the successful public ordering of “Europe.” Its goal is to shape and organize this political and economic area through law, a project involving societies of different mentalities, western democracies, old and young countries in transition, and former Great Powers. That might be ambitious enough, but pressure from outside the Union is also increasing. Alternative concepts campaign strongly to win supporters. The Union's integration agenda is plagued by obvious economic, financial, and social problems. A dissenting spirit has emerged around strongly held convictions concerning what has caused the problems and who should be held responsible. It is a dissenting spirit that, following the Brexit-referendum 23 June 2016, will have significant consequences. Now we have the first withdrawal of a Member State from the European Union.

Regardless of what happens in the next few months and years in the post-referendum UK, much of the harm has been done. The uncertainty, in particular, is killing. It will have a significant impact on many of the UK's most productive economic sectors including universities and financial services. It will cast a shadow over inward investment and over the willingness to take risks of those responsible, for example, for building new infrastructure. There will be a brain drain. Already in some respects the EU is acting as if the UK were no longer a Member State. It has no Commissioner since Jonathan Hill's resignation. After the EUCO summit on 29 June which took pace without the UK's presence, EU27 conclusions were issued.

The Brexit referendum confronted us with a “return of the repressed.” It represents a momentous eruption of popular sovereignty. The people have spoken. Liberals cringe: “Ugh, this is the voice of unreason.”