Here is my piece on UK/EU/Brexit that’s just gone up over at Huffington Post:

… our decisions today are part of bigger trends, even if in all the noise it’s hard to spot them. Here are three.

First, the European Union is like every other attempted pan-European project of the past 1000 years. It will rise then fall and vanish. It’s safe to say that in the lifetime of our children (and perhaps far earlier) it will change beyond recognition if not disappear entirely. The EU eerily resembles Tito’s Yugoslavia: a bizarre experiment in ‘brotherhood and unity’ that proved unable to resolve the contradictions it created for itself, and ended in disaster.

Second, the EU was created amidst machine-age conditions that no longer exist, to deal with problems that no longer exist. It’s machinery and general logic are anachronistic: much too heavy, slow, wasteful and inflexible to deal with today’s dangerously speedy problems. The EU delivers Mass. Real life demands Velocity.

Third, and most important, the EU can not answer the great challenge of this century: reconciling pell-mell technological transformation with the popular legitimacy that comes from institutional acknowledgement of shared identity. The ‘migration’ issue is all about this, as Joris Luyendijk recently pointed out:

What if the European project is an edifice with fatally flawed foundations? How does an open society based on equality survive, when every year it takes in tens if not hundreds of thousands of immigrants from countries with no tradition of openness, equality or democratic debate?

No mainstream EU leader has any convincing answer to this question. David Cameron gives an increasingly eccentric impersonation of fat boy Joe in Pickwick Papers: “I wants to make your flesh creep”. Sweden’s foreign minister Margot Wallström frets that too much democracy is a bad thing: a Brexit vote might lead to a domino effect of other member states wanting a vote and opting out. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble asserts that a post-Brexit UK would not have access to the Single Market, but also warns that whatever the result, “we have to take a serious look at reducing bureaucracy in Europe.” As anyone who has worked in the labyrinths of EU process knows, that is simply not deliverable.

The rest of Europe’s mainstream leaders would much rather the question was never posed. It’s no surprise that different forms of ‘populism’ are tapping in to public unease around this issue, both in Europe and beyond: Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Marie Le Pen, Donald Trump and many others are all selling themselves as strong leaders willing to ‘do what it takes’ to give answers…

…

Right at the heart of all these questions today are rival incompatible models of integration in a European context. One is based on the Eurozone: radical pooling of sovereignty and risk-sharing that can work only within something like a new state with strong central institutions moving taxpayers’ money across the zone to manage asymmetric problems. The other is a notably less prescriptive free trading space run by intelligent intergovernmentalism.

The current EU is a confusing hybrid of both, a doomed attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It’s no surprise that not one other regional economic grouping on Earth accepts the EU’s surrender of sovereign decision-making to a powerful centralised bureaucracy within a supranational legal order.

In short, the EU has attempted to climb the steep sand dune of history and is now stuck – any movement sideways or upwards risks uncontrolled sliding backwards.

Read the whole thing? Why not?