‘To fear or not to fear?’ The nature of the EU-27 countries’ vulnerability to Brexit

The uncertainty of the post-Brexit relations between the UK and the remaining EU-27 countries has caused political, social and economic concerns [Kroll, D. A., & Leuffen, D. (2016). Ties that bind, can also strangle: The Brexit threat and the hardships of reforming the EU. Journal of European PublicPolicy, 23(9), 1311–1320.]. The ongoing negotiations concerning future relations cover various scenarios that may have different impacts on the individual countries in both an economic and a political sense. The aim of the article is to analyse consequences of the British voters’ decision to withdraw from the European Union through the lens of a disintegration process by measuring the degree and the nature of vulnerability of the individual EU-27 countries. It demonstrates an economic and spatial approach to the critical assessment of Brexit, with focus on identifying the nature of individual countries vulnerability. In this way, we contribute to the ongoing debate on the Brexit negotiation process by providing strong arguments in favour of certain policy decision. In line with the ‘neighbor country’ and ‘small country’ hypotheses, we assume that closely located economies and small European economies will experience moderate to high negative consequences of Brexit, while larger ones will not be affected as much.