Can European Union survive Brexit

Britain’s vote to become the first country to leave the EU opens up a Pandora’s box of uncertainties threatening the survival of the whole post-war European project, analysts said on Friday.

The loss of one of its biggest members will at the very least force major changes on an embattled bloc faced with growing anti-European Union sentiment, a migration crisis and a struggling economy.

Calls for other referendums could in turn lead to a much looser grouping, and possibly even disintegration of a union established 60 years ago to restore security and prosperity to a Europe devastated by World War II.

The European Commission denied on Friday that the Brexit was the beginning of the end for the bloc, alth-ough EU President Donald Tusk had warned in the run-up to the vote that it could bring about the “destruction of not only the EU but also of Western political civilisation”.

Janis Emmanouilidis, director of studies at Brussels-based think tank European Policy Centre, said the vote means “a lot of uncertainty — for EU relations with Britain, for EU member states individually and for the bloc’s place in the world.”

“You have opened up the box towards an exit which is something which is sending a negative signal to the outside world but also to EU citizens in general,” Mr Emmanouilidis said.

Chris Bickerton, a lecturer at Britain’s Cambridge University and author of The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide, said it was a “very serious blow” but not necessarily fatal, given the “core role” of the EU in much of European political life.

“I don’t think it would suddenly disappear but over the longer term, we might see it slowly decline and become something different,” he said, envisaging a “looser, ad-hoc” union.

In the immediate aftermath of the British vote, seven years of potentially bitter divorce negotiations between Brussels and London loom, despite the EU’s calls for a quick exit.

Meanwhile, with a troublesome Britain on the outside, those more pro-integration member states on the inside appear set to press ahead on their own.

France and Germany, the EU’s power couple, have already been working on a joint plan but analysts believe they may not get very far given sharp differences over key issues such as the future of the euro single currency zone.

“The British have said ‘no’ to their establishment. It is a revolt of the small poeple against the ‘haves’,” said Domin-ique Moisi, with the Fre-nch Institute of International Relations.