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I’m with you on that one. I’m neither young nor retired, but I suspect my 2 year old youngest nephew may end his days seeing the entire English-speaking world reduced to nothing but a patchwork of micro city states, all plying one against each other. Sure philosophies and technology will grow, but they will all be pawns of the greater powers. At beast they may confederate into multiple Switzerlands - prosperous yes, and self-governing yes, but very inconsequential and at the mercy of the dominant powers of the day.
I have resolved now to encourage my nephew and any kids I may have to start learning German. kind of expect the West to be led by some Franco-German combination. We will be back to the early Middle Ages with the Frankish Empire leading the “West” and Charlemagne etc., and Britain was just a patchwork of micro fiefdoms constantly at war.
This article from the Claremont Institute explains perfectly why “we like self determination” to the nth degree is a dumb idea, justified from their own nation’s founding era. And it was written back in the1780s!
It applies equally to modern Britain as the US:
http://www.claremont.org/basicpage/sewards-folly-or-farsightedness/#.VBDEztkazCQ
“During the crisis of the 1780s, some Americans went so far as to question the viability of a geographically expansive Union. They pointed to the difficulty of governing such a massive territory without a despotic central government, and to the distinct interests that seemed to mark particular sections. Some in the West explored the idea of reaching an arrangement with Spain to separate from the United States. Others entertained the possibility of allowing three or four separate confederacies to emerge. Because each would have a republican form of government, they presumably could inhabit peacefully the same geopolitical space and trade to their mutual advantage. (It is difficult to find any important American political figure who explicitly made this case, but had efforts at constitutional reform failed, this might well have been the default outcome.)
The Constitution of 1787 offered an alternative—a large, commercial and federal republic—based on the assumption that nature and the American experiment in self-government could be aligned perfectly. Anything less would be disastrous. As Publius put it:
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
The relations among these independent sovereignties, Publius insisted, would not be characterized by peace and commerce but by unceasing conflicts of interests and war. The struggle to control an unnaturally divided geopolitical space would override the republican instincts of the people. North America would be racked with wars, just as Europe had been for centuries.
- See more at: http://www.claremont.org/basicpage/sewards-folly-or-farsightedness/#.VBDEztkazCQ";