How Brexit will work

Author: Kresta in the Afternoon Published on: June 24, 2016 Published in: Government

brexit

The U.K. has voted to leave the EU after a countrywide referendum, in a historic decision for the union.

With little precedent for the EU losing a leading member and British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing his resignation, speculation about the country and the continent’s future is rife. However, there are some questions we can already answer.

What is Article 50?

Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union outlines the process by which an EU member can leave the union. It begins with the member notifying the other states of its intention to leave, which sets in place a two-year deadline. New treaties signed by the EU as a bloc no longer apply to the U.K. once the two-year period has run out. However, as Richard Whitman, British political analyst at Chatham House tells Newsweek , the article only contains a process of how to split from the EU, but not what status it gains once this has happened.

“The complicated thing is, the article was devised just so there is a provision that allows a negotiation, but it really is more of a pen and ink drawing,” he says. “It provides an allowance for disentanglement, but it does not answer the question what we are disentangling into.”