Xabier González Barcos
Exactly a decade ago, the United Kingdom chose to leave the European Union. On 23 June 2016, 51.89 per cent of voters backed withdrawal, while 48.11 per cent supported remaining. The margin amounted to just 1.27 million votes in a country of more than sixty million people. Yet that slender majority set in motion one of the most complex, costly and divisive political processes in modern European history.
Ten years later, the anniversary coincides with another telling symbol: the resignation of Keir Starmer as head of the British government, paving the way for the seventh Prime Minister since that referendum. David Cameron fell because he called it; Theresa May because she could not deliver it; Boris Johnson because of the contradictions inherent in his own leadership; Liz Truss because of the collapse of her economic experiment; Rishi Sunak because of accumulated political exhaustion; and now Starmer because of his inability to stabilise a country that remains trapped in the consequences of that decision. What began as a promise to reclaim sovereignty has ultimately produced a decade of near-permanent political instability.
Brexit has been many things: an identity-driven phenomenon, a reaction against globalisation, an expression of English territorial discontent and even a revolt against certain political elites. Above all, however, it has served as a practical demonstration of the extraordinary difficulty of dismantling a complex political structure once it has been built.
For years, some European Eurosceptic movements portrayed the Union as little more than a bureaucratic club from which one could simply walk away in order to regain a supposedly lost freedom. Reality has proved precisely the opposite. The European Union is not merely a market, nor simply a diplomatic alliance. It is a legal, economic, regulatory and political architecture that permeates thousands of aspects of everyday life. Leaving it is not a matter of walking through a door; it is a matter of unravelling decades of integration.
Perhaps Brexit has reminded Europeans of something they themselves had forgotten: that the Union is far deeper and more resilient than it appears. Paradoxically, the strongest evidence of its solidity has not come from its successes, but from the immense difficulties encountered by the only state that chose to leave it.
The negotiations consumed years of political energy. They divided governments, parties and territories. They reopened the Irish question. They fuelled constitutional tensions in Scotland. They paralysed the British political agenda for half a decade. And once withdrawal had finally been achieved, it failed to resolve the structural problems that had driven support for Brexit in the first place. Immigration remained at the centre of political debate; regional inequalities persisted; economic growth remained subdued; and social discontent continued to nourish new forms of populism.
The first lesson of the past decade is therefore unmistakable: it is far easier to dismantle a complex political structure than to build a viable alternative to it. Brexit’s advocates promised liberation; what they inherited was an endless negotiation. They promised simplicity; they discovered complexity. They promised control; they delivered uncertainty.
Yet there is a second lesson—perhaps an even more uncomfortable one—concerning the very nature of democracy itself.
Brexit was legal. It was democratic. No serious observer disputes either of those facts. Yet ten years on, it remains entirely legitimate to ask whether decisions of such irreversible consequence ought to be determined by so narrow a majority.
Contemporary liberal democracy rests upon majority rule. No better principle has yet been devised. Nevertheless, political thinkers have long warned against the automatic equation of majority opinion with political wisdom.
Tocqueville feared what he famously called the “tyranny of the majority”: the possibility that a temporary majority might impose decisions profoundly detrimental to a substantial portion of society. John Stuart Mill argued for institutional safeguards precisely to prevent the arithmetic weight of votes from overwhelming the pluralism of a political community. More recently, philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas have insisted that democratic legitimacy derives not solely from the outcome of a vote, but also from the quality of the deliberative process that precedes it.
The question becomes particularly pressing when the decisions at stake are, for all practical purposes, irreversible.
A law can be amended. A government can be replaced. A budget can be revised. But a constitutional or geopolitical decision often generates consequences that extend across generations.
The British referendum was decided by a margin of less than four percentage points. In practical terms, that meant that almost half the country became bound to a historic transformation it did not want. More than sixteen million citizens voted to remain in the European Union. So too did millions of younger Britons who were not yet old enough to participate in the referendum, but who have spent their entire adult lives living with its consequences.
For that reason, many democratic systems impose heightened requirements for decisions of exceptional significance. Some establish minimum participation thresholds. Others require qualified majorities. Some even demand dual majorities, combining both territorial and population-based support.
The logic behind such safeguards is not anti-democratic. Quite the contrary. It stems from the belief that the more profound a decision is, the broader the consensus required to sustain it.
Democracy is not merely about counting votes. It is also about preserving the cohesion of the political community those votes are meant to govern.
Ten years on, Brexit stands as a warning against the dangers of reducing extraordinarily complex questions to binary choices. The referendum compressed decades of European integration into a single line on a ballot paper. The campaign was marked by simplifications, exaggerations and promises that could never truly be verified. The result was a country divided almost exactly in half.
The final irony is that Brexit was conceived as an assertion of popular sovereignty, yet it has evolved into a permanent source of democratic frustration. Those who supported leaving believe many of their objectives remain unfulfilled. Those who supported remaining remain convinced that a historic mistake was made. And the British political system continues to find itself trapped between these competing perceptions.
Perhaps the great lesson of the past decade is not merely that leaving the European Union is extraordinarily difficult. Perhaps the deeper lesson is that modern democracies must learn to distinguish between decisions that can legitimately be settled by a simple majority and those which, because they shape the destiny of generations, require something more than 51 per cent.
For when a nation is divided into two almost equal halves, arithmetic may produce a winner. What it rarely produces is a solution.