With you until the last paragraph. It's unclear what you mean by "investments needed to make the next advancements", but be aware that the UK is back in the EU Horizon Research programme. It rejoined that part only a year or so after leaving, something the Remain campaign and the EU's negotiators insisted would be impossible, and the Brexit campaigners said would be an obvious and common sense move for the EU. Turned out the latter were correct, the Remainers were wrong and the EU itself was bluffing.
That said, it's not very likely that teaming up with the EU makes any difference. The UK was a full member during a time of economic stagnation. The EU is not outperforming it.
>Countries like Britain can only do it when they team up as in the EU. The Brexiters are essentially luddites who cannot see this writing on the wall
The UK remains one of the world powers and the Pound Sterling one of the reserve currencies thanks to their familial ties with the Five Eyes and the Commonwealth Realm, and select friends like Japan.
Island country and continent countries bloody hating each other is a tale older than history. If anything, it's the EU (namely France and Germany) who need to figure out how to get countries fully on board with them.
> The UK remains one of the world powers and the Pound Sterling one of the reserve currencies
With every passing year this becomes less true.
The UK is in managed decline, the entire world knows it; its only brits themselves who see themselves as exceptional.
(I’m British, living in Sweden).
Yeah I was against Brexit as it was a huge upheaval that made trade with our main trading partners harder but small independent countries can do very well if they are open to trade and are run sensibly. Look at Singapore for example.
> and all have developed
Isn't that true of pretty much every country, even the few that were never colonized by European powers?
I mean, Afghanistan developed since its independence in 1919, but that's hardly attributable to some sort of intrinsic Britishness.
Same for Egypt, with its 1922 independence, or Libya in 1951.
Just like how Vietnam developed after independence from France.
While we've seen how Japan developed without being part of any colonial system. ("it was probably better in the end to be conquered by the Romans than many others" rejects the idea that it might have been better to not be conquered at all.)
> A "country" is just a lot of bits that someone conquered.
The modern definition of a "country" also requires a permanent population and a government, along with recognition by other countries. Note that this definition is of fundamentally European origin.
Further note the difficulty of using your definition for "Northern Cyprus" and "Sealand", much less the "Sovereign Military Order of Malta".
Japan was a colonising state, Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan