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Comment by vegabook | Hacker News Reader

Small problem: the Europeans have had enough of Britains's perfidious ways and are not inclined to being patient. This pandoras box is therefore open for business and cannot easily be be rammed shut again.

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Would the EU not love to have the UK do a u-turn, showing the other potential EU leavers that leaving looks better than the reality?

Yes but there are powerful forces within Europe that always felt Britain was a ball and chain, especially in the latin bloc led by France. This is not going to be simple as they will insist that a rubicon has been crossed. Recall that Charles de Gaulle himself was against British involvement in continental Europe, considering it a trojan horse. Just recently and for a whole decade, for example, Britain was vocally pro Turkish accession to the EU, against Italy and France. Ironically the same issue was used by the Brexit campaign, feeding Britain's image as an opportunistic Judas. Distrust of Britain runs deep in the southern bloc.

As such, with all these forces, this vote genuinely reshuffles the deck, in Europe itself, even if Britain now backtracks.

None of which matters a whit if Britain does not invoke Article 50.

If the UK stays in the EU despite this referendum result, then there will be significant civil unrest and it will lurch even further to the right. I doubt it would be in the benefit of the EU to have a member state who's population chose not to be in it, and yet are forced to stay in it. That is the sort of unrest that will spread across borders.

The member state chose not to be in it for long-known reasons. If the EU learns the concept of democracy from this, and entertains the idea of loosening its stubborn insistence that things set up in a way that has long been problematic and is now seriously damaging, they might dare to consider some flexibility and the idea of loose coupling.

Edit (I forgot my point and finished too soon :)

If the EU relaxed a little the departing member state may democratically u-turn.

Dead right, but nevertheless S.50 can only be invoked by Britain.

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