There was a whiff of Monty Python about the Brexit referendum. In Life of Brian, the People’s Front of Judea asks the famous question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

As it turns out, very little – apart from providing Judea with sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health and peace.

Conversely, to Brits asking what the EU had ever done for them, a similarly comprehensive answer could have been given. Not much good ever came from Brussels – except for the right to live and work anywhere in Europe, unrestricted access to the world’s biggest single market, and enjoying the benefits of pan-European trade and competition.

Surely, with this track record, even a People’s Front of Britain should have been convinced of the blessings of Europe? What’s there not to love about the EU?

Yet we know the result of last week’s referendum. Despite its obvious advantages, a majority of a voters turned their back on the European Union. Were they just ignorant, ungrateful or nostalgic? Or might they have a point?

It depends on how you look at it. The great achievements of the EU mentioned above are all part of the so-called European single market. This single market was meant to guarantee the “four freedoms:” the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. However, to be more precise, the organisation that should take credit for these achievements is not the EU but its predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC).

The EEC’s goal was to promote economic integration of its member states. Of course, there were geopolitical underpinnings of this project. Not least was the EEC part of the strategy to unite western Europe against the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its allies. At its core, though, the EEC was an economic policy project. The creation of the single market was its goal.

And the EEC was a success story. Since its start with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, it had not only managed to eliminate trade barriers between its members, it was also an attractive proposition for other countries to join. This explains why the UK tried long and hard to be admitted into the club and confirmed accession with a two-thirds majority in the 1975 referendum.

Time to pause The time around, the fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with the culmination of the EEC’s achievements. The single market officially started on January  1,1993.

In hindsight, this should have been the time to pause and reflect carefully on the future of the EEC. It was obvious back then that the former communist countries of central and Eastern Europe would try to become members of the EEC. But it was also clear that their stages of economic and political development would take a long time to match those in the west of the continent. A sense of Europe fatigue was also noticeably kicking in. Yes, Europeans were enjoying the blessings of Europe’s economic integration. They enjoyed the access to foreign markets, international travel and studying at international universities. However, they also noticed Brussels’ growing bureaucracy, its regulatory overreach and policy disasters such as the legendary butter mountains and wine lakes.

It would have been wise, therefore, for the EEC to consolidate what it had achieved and work hard to integrate its prospective new members from the east.

Instead, Europe’s political leaders opted for a different option. With the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, they decided to transform the EEC into a deeper political project. First renamed the European Community and then the European Union, this development was already visible in the name.

The change from EEC to EC and then EU was more than just semantics. It changed the nature of the European project. Where previously the focus was on making the European single market work, the new organisation was about creating something resembling a superstate.

Under EU law, there are several areas in which the EU has exclusive competence. They include the customs union, competition rules, monetary policy for eurozone members, the common fisheries policy, the common commercial policy and the conclusion of certain international agreements.

Shared competencies

In other areas, the EU shares competencies with its members. This affects parts of social policy, economic, social and territorial cohesion, environmental policy, consumer protection, transport, trans-European networks, energy, security and justice, and elements of public health matters.

This power-shift was not been accompanied by a corresponding shift of democratic legitimacy and control. Nor was it widely supported by public opinion.

In fact, plans for this structure were rejected in referendums in the Netherlands and France in 2005 when it was promoted as the European constitution. The plans survived only because the rejected constitution was still pushed through under a new name, the Lisbon Treaty. This time, though, no people got to vote on it. Europe’s leaders had learned their lessons to avoid asking voters for permission.

So the EU’s establishment would have been horrified by the prospect of putting the question of EU membership to the British people. As an In or Out? choice, it did not make too much sense anyway. It made even less sense when it is unclear what Out would mean in practice.

What is a real pity, however, is that a binary choice mixes the great achievements of the EU’s predecessor with its current flaws and failings. What should a person supporting the single market but sceptical about political union have voted for?

 In the end, the British decided to value democracy more highly than their short-term economic interests. In a post-referendum survey, the main reason named by Brexit supporters was not immigration. It was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.”

A 52% majority of Britons have voted to leave the EU. That does not make them racist, xenophobe or unenlightened (certainly not the majority of them). It only shows that they reject the centralising, anti-democratic arrogance that Europe’s political leadership has shown since the creation of the EU.

It is the EU itself that deserves most of the blame for the Brexit vote. Its failings have become so big that, at least in the eyes of the public, they now outweigh its achievements.

In other words, if the EU does not radically reform and refocus on what it once made a force for good, Brexit will only be the beginning of a process of European disintegration.