1
An interesting analogy to Britain and the EU is the 13 colonies and Britain circa 1770. The basic similarity is the larger entity and the smaller entity moving apart because the smaller entity was being directed by the larger entity to a degree it hadn't anticipated. Reading Paine's Common Sense yields some points of resonance between then and now, though the colonies' path vis a vis Britain from let's say 1720 to 1776 was very different from Britain's path vis a vis the EU from 1950 to 2016.