Brexit Is a Call for Help Echoed Around the World

It was lunchtime on 29 March 2017, nine months after Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU), when Sir Tim Barrow, Britain’s permanent representative at the EU, handed Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, a letter that began the two-year timetable for Britain’s exit from the EU: Brexit. Under Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, any of the EU’s 28 member states has the right to exit from the EU, but, once star­ted, only an agreement by all 28 countries could halt the process.

A two-year conveyor belt that was hard to step off was designed to dissuade countries from starting the process, but once they had started it, they were required to hasten an orderly negotiated exit.  But, that was just theory, for no one had tried to exit before. We are now only seven months away from Brexit, and the world’s ninth largest economy seems to be about to crash out of the world’s largest trading bloc without an orderly negotiated arrangement for the future relationship between the EU and the United Kingdom (UK). This should matter to us all.