Britain is reconsidering its relationship with the continent. The country has never felt fully comfortable with its membership in an EU that has been conceived, after World War II, as a marriage between Germany and France. With the euro crisis taking centre stage since 2008, this unease has turned into open hostility. And each time German chancellor Angela Merkel talks of "political union", British nightmares of becoming an entity in a "superstate", run by an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels, seem to become a realistic prospect. Recent polls suggest that about half of Brits would like to leave the EU. But before waving goodbye, the UK should make a honest assessment of what's at stake. The current British debate over EU membership is mostly about the economics. But the EU's main value is geopolitical.
