Britain's historic vote last June to leave the European Union marks the beginning of the end for the free-trade area. It will be a change as monumental as the end of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago. The parallels are eerie.
Back in 1988 I had the good fortune to work in Hungary for a summer. It was then well within the Soviet Bloc. Even so, the Kremlin's grip on the country had loosened in the late 1980s and that gave the people in Hungary a sniff of freedom that quickly doomed the whole socialist system. That hot summer in Budapest, I saw and heard Hungarians itching to break free of communism. German friends, also working there for the summer, saw it too and planned expansion of family businesses into what had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The groundswell quickly became unstoppable. A few years later the Soviet Empire collapsed under it's own weight.
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