What's wrong with integration? You clearly think it's bad but don't say why.
Ah, downvote me for replying with a question. Mature. I guess you don't have a reason that doesn't boil down to "I don't want foreigners next door"?
Ah, downvote me for replying with a question. Mature. I guess you don't have a reason that doesn't boil down to "I don't want foreigners next door"?
By integration I mean political integration. I think very large states have scale problems, large democracies in particular. (Look at India or the US). You either end up with populist parties who need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of hundreds of millions of people, or technocratic elites who ignore the people. The EU has 500 million citizens from 27 ancient nations, with wildly different cultures and economies. There's no way you can fuse them into one giant country, and the inevitable outcome is fuelling nationalism and populism centred around anti-EU resentment.
Those "ancient nations" are mostly less than a century old. Europe has been a superstate several times previously, although it admittedly hasn't lasted under political or religious hegemony.
To Europe, the EU represents stability. To the UK, it represents change.
I mean, you don't consider yourself French, do you? If you view yourself as being a member of that "continuous" state, you should, for by that measure we are Normans.
All nations have a chunk of mythos holding them together. Brexit seems to be popular among people who think that Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples is good history.
That said, if I had been voting (I'm a US citizen) I would almost certainly have voted remain in part because pulling out of the existing union is going to be a mess. And because the UK is already outside of important parts of EU-related structure such as the Euro. But I would have done so in spite of many of the aspirations to create a European super-state that many in Brussels share.