Butorina O V
Institute of Europe, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
Her Russ Acad Sci. 2020;90(6):680-687. doi: 10.1134/S1019331620060040. Epub 2021 Jan 21.
On January 31, 2020, the United Kingdom, a country with a population of 67 mln people and the fifth largest economy in the world, left the European Union. The case when a state ceased to be an EU member is the first in the history of European integration. Except for the episode with Greenland, which left the EEC in 1985, the group had invariably expanded before that. The currently available extensive body of literature on Brexit is mainly represented by works dedicated to Britain. Fewer works are devoted to the European Union; they mainly address institutional issues, such as the ratio of supranational and intergovernmental management methods and the pros and cons of differentiated integration. This article poses the problem more broadly. Its goal is to clarify how Brexit will affect the strategic potential of integration, not its forms. The author concludes that, although the European Union suffers significant economic, political, and conceptual losses, Brexit paradoxically imparts dynamism to the integration process. There emerge preconditions for the formation of two competing democratic regimes in Europe. The new situation draws a line under the 30-year (since the fall of the Berlin Wall) period of ideological and institutional domination of the EU as the only possible model of European development. Competition with Britain can be extremely useful for the European Union to rethink its attitudes, reject dogmas, and develop a new ideology of integration that would meet not the conditions of bipolar confrontation but the challenges of mature globalization.
2020年1月31日，拥有6700万人口且为世界第五大经济体的英国脱离了欧盟。一个国家不再是欧盟成员国这种情况在欧洲一体化历史上尚属首次。除了1985年格陵兰岛脱离欧洲经济共同体这一事件外，在此之前该组织一直在不断扩张。目前现有的大量关于英国脱欧的文献主要以研究英国的著作为主。专门研究欧盟的著作较少；它们主要探讨制度问题，比如超国家管理方法与政府间管理方法的比例以及差异化一体化的利弊。本文更广泛地提出了这个问题。其目的是阐明英国脱欧将如何影响一体化的战略潜力，而非其形式。作者得出结论，尽管欧盟遭受了重大的经济、政治和观念上的损失，但英国脱欧却反常地为一体化进程注入了活力。欧洲出现了形成两种相互竞争的民主制度的先决条件。这种新形势为自柏林墙倒塌以来长达30年的欧盟在思想和制度上作为欧洲发展唯一可能模式的主导地位画上了句号。与英国的竞争对欧盟重新思考其态度、摒弃教条以及形成一种新的一体化意识形态可能极为有益，这种新意识形态将适应成熟全球化的挑战，而非两极对抗的条件。
