The shrinking of the European union and its integration capability

The United Kingdom, a country with 67 million people and the world‟s fifth largest economy, formally withdrew from the European Union on 31 January 2020. Apart from the loss of Greenland in 1985, the Union has been expanding for decades; now for the first time in its history it is shrinking. The existing literature on Brexit focuses mainly on Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, the European Union. The latter material predominantly addresses institutional issues. There have been a number of scholarly assessments of differentiated integration and disintegration in the EU after Brexit, as well as of the changing nexus between intergovernmental and supranational instruments. This article contributes to a broader debate on the subsequent evolution of European integration with an emphasis on its intrinsic driving forces, rather than on forms and methods. Our analysis shows that, although the European Union will suffer significant economic, political and semantic losses, Brexit may also galvanize the integration process. It may create the necessary premises for the emergence of two competing democratic regimes in Europe. This new situation draws a line under the 30-year period (since the fall of the Berlin Wall) of the EU‟s ideological and institutional dominance as an uncontested model of European development. Potential political and normative rivalry with the United Kingdom may be extremely stimulating for the European Union, pushing it to reassess its attitudes, reject dogma and develop a new integration ideology that would respond to the challenges of unchecked economic globalization and set aside outdated patterns of the bipolar world order