Berlin’s Brexit Blues: A Plan to Keep Calm and Carry On

Parke Nicholson

Parke Nicholson was previously the Senior Research Associate at AICGS. He was selected to participate in the Munich Young Leaders 2016 program at the 52nd Munich Security Conference. Previously, he worked at the Center for the National Interest and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2008, he served on the foreign policy staff at Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters. He has also worked abroad in Austria and Germany: in 2005 through the Fulbright Program in Klagenfurt and in 2010-2011 as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow working in the German Foreign Office for the Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation and for Daimler AG’s Political Intelligence unit in Stuttgart.

Parke has recently published in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The Baltimore Sun, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He received his MA in International Relations from The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University and a BA in History and Violin Performance at The College of Wooster in Ohio.

Queen Elizabeth, the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch, undertook what was, perhaps, her final state visit last year. Of all the places she could have traveled to, she chose Germany, the de facto leader of Europe. The three-day tour was filled with reminders of U.K.-German relations—a lecture on their shared history by the popular historian Neil MacGregor of the British Museum, a speech on U.K.-German business ties in Frankfurt (a financial hub that could benefit from Brexit), and a first visit to the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated by British troops in 1945. It was a trip that clearly, though subtly, reflected the queen’s position on Brexit: the United Kingdom must remain in the European Union.

The article appeared originally in Foreign Affairs on Jun 22, 2016. Continue reading here.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American-German Institute.