[native_samples]

Only a small minority of people actually think continent sized governments are a good idea, especially in Europe. Most people think this is self-evidently a bad idea, which is why the EU leaderships are never willing to let people actually have a referendum on the question - the UK being the lone exception, and look at how nastily the various pro-EU minorities in power tried to stop it being implemented!

"Americans manage to do it, after all."

Americans fought a brutal civil war to ensure the federal government would continue to enjoy supremacy over the states. In the modern era, about half of Americans currently think their country is heading for a second civil war, according to opinion polls. In recent days you're seeing elected federal politicians directly state that people should disobey rulings of the Supreme Court and laws of state governments. You've had federal agencies spying on and directly attacking elected presidents, with no consequences.

So it is absolutely not clear that Americans manage to do this, in a timeless/stable sense. They've managed it in the 20th century but for most of that time they had serious external enemies to bind the country together. Historically speaking, very large and powerful governments tend to collapse from internal decay, splintering into small countries. The number of countries rapidly increased in the 20th century as empires fell apart and new countries formed in their wake. Very few/no people regret this process - you don't see many people hankering after the Ottoman Empire or USSR, do you? A lot of the instability in the Middle East is a legacy of this process, for example.

[jonp888]

That's simply not true.

A glance at any opinion poll shows there is nowhere near a majority for leaving the EU in any member country.

Politicians who used to talk about it as a goal, such as Le Penn in France, no longer mention it at all, having seen how chaotic it was for the UK.

[native_samples]

The polls said the same for the British population before the referendum process started. The population changed its mind before the vote.

Actually, you have to be careful with polls. Polling showed a very clear and strong majority of the British population did not like the EU and were basically opposed to it, but a significant chunk of those people were scared of the threatened economic and tax consequences (which were in the end a lie - there was no emergency tax hike and no recession). If they had not been threatened with ruin then the Leave vote would have been much higher.

The EU has demonstrated it is willing to create essentially unlimited amounts of disruption in order to stop countries leaving. It won't play nice, or respect the wishes of the electorate. It will fight them. Inevitably that scares people, it did in the UK too. This does not mean that those people actually like their situation.

[phatfish]

You have to be careful about referendums too, especially when the government organizing them disenfranchises a group of citizens that are very likely to vote a certain way (UK migrants in the EU).

People didn't vote to remain in the EU because they were scared, no matter how much you want it to be that way. There are real tangible benefits of EU membership that UK citizens didn't want to loose.

Last I checked the UK had left, it has not been stopped. That one thing caused a lot of problems for the conspiracy theorists and anti-EU crowd who were suggesting it was not possible for a country to leave. Now the goal posts have been moved on that argument to the EU trying to make it "as hard as possible".

I wonder if leaving the UK is harder than leaving the EU. We might get to find out soon.