The shocking victory of the “Leave” campaign in Thursday’s referendum was a massive repudiation of the elite-driven European project and a testament to the enduring pull of national sovereignty in an age of global anxiety. It is a momentous decision that will reverberate well beyond the British Isles. Besides posing an immediate, existential crisis for the European Union and the United Kingdom itself, the outcome will embolden skeptics of international institutions and multilateral cooperation in the United States.

For the first time in its history, the EU faces a real prospect of unraveling.

For the European Union, the referendum is a wake-up call that may have come too late. For decades, the EU has suffered from a dramatic deficit of democracy, as well as of loyalty. Throughout the continent, “Brussels” has long been shorthand for officious, unaccountable Eurocrats meddling in everything from fisheries to the proper shape of bananas. In an effort to close this deficit, the EU and its predecessors created several new institutions, most notably the European Parliament (EP), headquartered in Strasbourg. But the EP lacks real power, and voter turnout in its elections is dismal. The EU—too often distant, opaque, and unresponsive—commands little allegiance among its 500 million inhabitants.

These dynamics have been especially corrosive in Great Britain. The UK joined the EU party late (in 1973), after centuries of splendid isolation and imperial grandeur. And it has always been the EU’s “awkward partner.” The British have enjoyed perks of the common market, as well as visa-free travel to holiday in Malaga, but their primary allegiance has and always will be to the nation. Their leaders have reinforced public cynicism, repeatedly using the EU as a scapegoat while promising, in the manner of (soon-to-be former) Prime Minister David Cameron, to “fix” it.

Image: Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and champion of the “Leave” campaign, speaks during a rally in Manchester, England, on April 15, 2016 (Andrew Yates/Reuters).