EU needs to return to founding principles if it is to survive

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”

Samuel Beckett’s disdainful line from the play Murphy hardly rings true today and if the sun does not shine as it should on a Saturday morning in June then the cricket-playing Irishman who lived in Paris and wrote in French, could be wrong on two out of three fronts. We are, like it or not, trying to find our feet in an entirely new, less comfortable and far more uncertain world this morning.

Britain’s narrow decision — 51.8% against 48.2% — to quit the European Union after more than four decades, and only then after a considerable struggle to win acceptance, is a seismic, disappointing, challenging, dangerous and unexpected rejection of the European project. It is, tragically, all of those things on myriad levels. German chancellor Angela Merkel was succinct: “There is no point beating about the bush. Today represents a break in Europe’s history, a break in the process of European integration.”