An aspect of all this which most brexiters appear to ignore is the fact that with the exception of very large countries such as the USA. China, Russia etc. most other leading industrial nations are members of some kind of larger trading block. The nation state (at least when talking about a country the size of Britain) is too small to compete effectively in a globalized World, yet is too large to guarantee democracy for all of its citizens. So many countries are sandwiched between globalization on the one hand, and a rising regionalism on the other,and, in the meantime, their resources have been mostly privatized so nation states mostly do not have the resources they had 40 years ago. Europe is simply too small to conceive of it's future as being that of individual sovereign states in competition with each other. If the Eurozone collapsed, or even the EU. itself - it would be very quickly replaced for this reason. There is much which is wrong with the EU. It was the free market economist Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual architect of neoliberalism, who called in 1939 for ''interstate federalism'' in Europe to prevent voters from using democracy to interfere with the operations of the free market. The tools of Keynesian economics, upon which democracy relies, are now illegal in Europe - and Thatcherism is, more or less, anchored into the constitution of the EU. We have been asleep to this. We need to regain Europe for it's citizens, not run away from it. We need to demand that the EU. Parliament (the people we actually vote for) actually act as a parliament in more than just name. It has been said that the only people who actually listen to MEPs in Brussels are the interpreters - that, in fact, the EU. Commission (unelected) decides everything behind closed doors.
