For example, in the 19th century, many people found it simply unbearable that Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo and exiled to Saint Helena. According to Carrera, the idea that it could not have been otherwise was bound to provoke a revolt.
Carrer’s arguments have become relevant once again as we mark the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum: by a narrow margin, a majority of British voters decided to leave the European Union. To understand where this result came from, we need to look back at least a decade, to a time when European integration was at its peak.
In 2004, ten countries—including eight former communist states—joined the EU as part of the bloc’s largest expansion in history. Two years earlier, the euro had been introduced, and the Schengen visa-free travel system had opened borders that had previously divided peoples and caused wars throughout history.
To an entire generation of Europeans, all these achievements seemed as natural as they were inevitable. It was the peak of European ambitions.
But today, looking back, we can see that it was also a moment of danger. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the vulnerability of a single currency that is not backed by a political and fiscal union.
Enlargement to the east ran up against Russia’s revanchist plans, which came to full light when President Vladimir Putin ordered attacks on Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.
New freedom of movement drew attention to alarming demographic changes, and this issue came to the forefront after the failure of the Arab Spring uprisings and the subsequent refugee crisis in 2015.
It was against this backdrop that the Brexit campaign and the referendum itself took place. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s miscalculation was his confidence that the referendum would help quell Euroskeptic sentiment within his Conservative Party.
This mistake is well documented. However, the conditions that made all of this possible had been building up for more than a decade.
The Domino Effect
After the vote for Brexit, a domino effect began: each new global disruption seemed unimaginable until it actually happened.
That same year, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, then the mass killings carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza, Trump returned to the U.S. presidency, and the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran.
Each of these events made the next one seem less unimaginable.
And yet it is worth considering what would have happened if British voters had decided to remain in the EU—not out of nostalgia, but to assess just how random and unpredictable some of the subsequent events might have become.
If Britain hadn’t set an example of how a major Western democracy could voluntarily begin dismantling the postwar order, Trump’s rival in the 2016 election—Hillary Clinton—would have had a better chance of winning. And if she had won, many things would have turned out differently.
For example, the Clinton administration would clearly have fought the pandemic in a more predictable manner—and based on facts. And Putin, deprived of the spectacle of the West’s self-destruction, might have refrained from ordering a full-scale invasion.
But these are merely assumptions that cannot be verified. Moreover, they do not refute the argument of inevitability.
The same alternative approach allows us to argue that the landmark events of the last decade would have occurred even if Britain had remained in Europe. The fact is that the growing rift between America and Europe, like the rise of populism, was caused neither by Brexit nor by Trump.
The upheavals of 2016 were, rather, merely symptoms.
Rewriting History
The collapse of the liberal international order can be explained by deeper structural, economic, cultural, and generational forces. Brexit may have seemed to happen suddenly, but perhaps it had been brewing for a long time.
But what does all this tell us about the benevolent determinism that prevailed in Europe a generation ago? Was the belief that progress toward liberal democracy, peace, and international cooperation was natural and inevitable an illusion, given that all these noble ideals have encountered worthy rivals in the form of Putin and Trump?
Yes, an alternative history serves the plans of authoritarian leaders well. Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine by rewriting history and concluding that the Ukrainian nation never existed. And on January 6, 2021, Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to rewrite the history of the 2020 election.
During Trump’s second term, alternative history became his governing method: lies are presented as facts, the outrageous is normalized, and surrealism turns into policy. Alternative history turns out to be not a rebellion, but a justification for the use of brute force.
But if alternative history is motivated by intolerance for the inevitable, then perhaps the lesson of the last ten years is that we must reclaim our history.
We have renounced rebellion—our ability to create positive events ourselves—and fatalistically resigned ourselves to the decline of the West. We could have acted differently.
Fabrizio Tassinari
Fabrizio Tassinari is the founding executive director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute (EUI) and the author of*In Search of Governance Methods: Scandinavian Reports on the New Middle Way”(Agenda Publishing, 2021).
©: Project Syndicate, 2026.
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