A Guide to Catching Up on ‘Brexit’ and Reading the Tea Leaves

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/world/europe/brexit-explainer.html

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WASHINGTON — Since more than 17 million people voted for Britain to disengage from the European Union, every news cycle brings word of a head-spinning new possibility. Might the United Kingdom disunite? Can the world’s financial markets continue their seismic turmoil indefinitely? Could the referendum be reversed, rejected or repeated?

If you’re struggling to keep up with what’s happened and flummoxed by the seemingly fraught future, you’re not alone. Here’s a reading list to help you understand what’s going on and why, whether you’re just trying to grasp the basics or have been following all along but seek a deeper understanding.

Before the vote, my colleague Steven Erlanger wrote a rundown of the basic facts, so that’s the place to start if you’re looking for the who-what-when-where-why of it all.

“Brexit, Explained: 7 Questions About What It Means and Why It Matters” — written (by yours truly) before the vote — traces the forces leading up to the referendum, including the cases campaigners made for staying and leaving, and the likely consequences for Europe.

And for a post-vote explainer, check out “Brexit: What Happens When Britain Leaves the E.U.,” by Timothy B. Lee of Vox.

My colleague Peter S. Goodman said it best: “No one really knows what happens now.” This is such a major economic event, and the details of how it will play out are so uncertain, that no one can predict the consequences with much certainty.

The BBC offers a good summary of what we know so far, and it’s mostly negative. The pound has fallen to a three-decade low against the dollar, and some stocks plummeted so sharply on Monday that the London Stock Exchange temporarily halted their trading.

If the British government curbs immigration after the country leaves the European Union, a prime promise of the “Leave” campaign, that could further worsen the financial picture. This study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in Britain explains why limiting immigration would slash economic growth.

That’s a complicated question. “Making Sense of ‘Brexit’ in 4 Charts,” which I also wrote before the vote, shows that Leave voters overwhelmingly cited immigration as the most important issue. But it would be a mistake to conclude that this was because of personal experience: The areas of the country with the fewest immigrants were those that voted most heavily to leave. The referendum exposed deep divides between young and old, rich and poor, urban London and “Little England” outside it.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a business editor at The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, wrote an anguished essay about why he planned to vote to leave the bloc despite his confidence that doing so would have devastating economic consequences:

Of course, having won, some who voted to leave are now furiously backpedaling their decisions, as my colleague Stephen Castle wrote this week. They might have voted as a form of protest, as a way to register their dissatisfaction against the vague system rather than the European Union, or Europe, specifically.

Perhaps because elites embarked on a project to remake Europe without checking if their citizens were on board with the plan, suggested Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, in a speech on May 30. “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm,” he said. Whoops.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas made a similar point: “The European Parliament was supposed to construct a bridge between the political conflict of opinions in the national arenas and the momentous decisions taken in Brussels — but this bridge is almost devoid of traffic.”

This isn’t a new problem. The New York Review of Books published an article by the British historian Tony Judt in 1996 that outlined the contradictions embedded within the union from the beginning. It seems prescient now.

Yes and no, my colleague Sarah Lyall explains in a delightful article published a few weeks before the vote.

For a more personal look at Britons’ sense of separateness from Europe — even for those who long for all “the Continent” has to offer — consider Peter Mayle’s 1989 memoir “A Year in Provence.” In humorous detail, Mr. Mayle, who is British, described the wonder and confusion he felt as he tried to adjust to life in southern France.

The vote has roiled the country’s politics, my colleagues Mr. Erlanger, Mr. Castle and Sewell Chan reported on Monday. Today, the British government is what one might generously call “in flux” and more accurately describe as “in chaos.” Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to resign — but not right away. Boris Johnson, who campaigned vigorously to leave the bloc and is seen as a leading contender to replace Mr. Cameron, is now anxiously trying to reassure voters — and the markets — that leaving will look a lot like staying. And the opposition Labour Party has seen most of its shadow cabinet quit or get fired.

But the bigger consequence might be that the vote has put three centuries of British unity in jeopardy, as my colleague Max Fisher wrote over the weekend. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union, while England and Wales voted to leave. A British exit from the bloc could mean that Scotland will seek independence, or that Sinn Fein will push to unite Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic.

And by voting to leave, the English have “planted a bomb” under the Irish peace process, the columnist Fintan O’Toole warned in The Guardian. The Belfast Agreement, the 1998 treaty that forms the cornerstone of the peace process, permits all residents of Northern Ireland to have British and Irish citizenship, and it commits to incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into Northern Irish law. But the problems aren’t just legal. Brexit is deeply unsettling for unionists in Northern Ireland, Mr. O’Toole argues, because it “suggests that the new English nationalism is completely indifferent to their fate.”

American commentators have been quick to draw parallels between the Leave campaign and that of Donald J. Trump. At Slate, Jamelle Bouie compared racial politics in the United States and Britain, in an article with the headline: “Embattled whiteness gave us Brexit. It won’t give us President Trump.”

In New York magazine, Annie Lowrey suggests that this kind of right-wing populism might bubble up “during periods of slow-but-steady growth, high inequality and wage stagnation — economic conditions that rankle voters but do not obsess them.” That means that unsatisfied voters focus on issues other than the economy, making them especially receptive to populist campaigning.

And in Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama offers an explanation of populist fervor for Mr. Trump in the United States that might also apply quite well to supporters of a Brexit. The fortunes of the white working class, he explains, are stagnating; their prospects are declining. But that’s just the backdrop. The current populist moment is a failure of politics: “There has indeed been a problem of representation in American institutions: Neither political party has served the declining group well.”