The Adjustment Of UK's European Policy In The Context Of Brexit

The Brexit referendum,held on 23 June 2016 in UK,has and will have a very important impact on the UK-EU relations.According to the result of the referendum voted by British people,UK will leave EU,which results in the adjustment of its EU policy.After 43 years of being an EU member,UK has to face the conversion from a member state to a non-member state,and that is not an easy task for British government.After hundreds of year's interactions with the European continent,UK government has formed its own policy traditions,endowed with the focus on economic interests and strong sense of Euroscepticism.After the referendum,the future EU policy will inevitably be affected by these traditions.With the end of World War II,UK-EU relations entered into a new stage.Both UK and the European countries were heavily harmed by the war.The idea of European integration then became very popular among these European countries.Facing with the rising voice of European Unity,UK's European policy underwent a series of adjustments and changes.from the initial stage of detachment,to the rejection of joining into the European Community and then transferred to the application to join the EC.After joining into EC,UK faced more and more contradictions with it for the two sides had different understandings in terms of EC idea substantially.Entering into the 21st century,the European debt crisis made their contradiction much severer than before because of the internal difficulties in EU.Euroscepticism became more and more popular in UK.In order to alleviate the divergence in the country,the former Prime Minister David Cameron decided to hold a referendum to vote for the UK's membership of EU.The result was known but unexpected.Their people voted to exit from EU.After the referendum,UK government still has lots of challenges to face with.How to adjust their EU policy becomes the key task for May.Article 50 of Lisbon Treaty is important,which regulates the withdrawal of a member state from EU.However,as the first country seeks to exit,Brexit is expected to be a hard and difficult process.The government has to do much preparation and deal with the potential risks,including the domestic dissent on Brexit issues,the rising separatism inside and the external pressure from EU.All these factors make Brexit become much more uncertain.Today,the exiting process is continuing.The draft agreement on the withdrawal was vetoed by Parliament three times and the government can't also reach to a consensus on it either.Brexit has reached to a deadlock.Where the government will go in EU policy is still uncertain.So the EU policy will be close to the Brexit process for a long time.After May's resignation in June,how to solve this dilemma under the new government is worthy of attention.Although the exiting process may end in the near future,Brexit will persistently affect the UK-EU relations and can be regarded as an important point of the bilateral relations.