To understand the Brexit situation, the beginning of wisdom is to look closely at what is happening in the rest of Europe.
One will see exactly the same forces at work — rejection of too much centralism, yearning for greater local control — that have driven the British to pull out of the European Union.
In almost every state political pressures are welling up, some of them openly populist, challenging the established political class and questioning its values and its legitimacy — and of course questioning even more strongly the higher "authority" of rule by a supranational European hierarchy bent on submerging national identities in an integrated totality.