United Nations Office at Geneva by Falcon® Photography. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
The first “Brexit” is almost a century old, and it did not even involve Britain. It occurred on 14 June 1926, when Brazil notified the League of Nations it would leave the world organization. Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Venezuela, and Peru, together with Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, followed in the 1930s. These mass withdrawals from the League were widely interpreted as a sign that the organization was in crisis.
Brexit is not a singular phenomenon. In legal terms, it constitutes a withdrawal of a member state from an intergovernmental organization, though with a profound effect on the organization being left. Since World War II, such withdrawals may have been less spectacular but they have occurred frequently. When the US left the International Labour Organization in 1977, for example, the consequences for the organization were severe. In 1984/85 when the US, the UK and Singapore withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the institution noted plainly that its “budget [dropped] considerably.” And when Morocco left the Organisation of African Unity in 1984, the pan-African organization no longer represented Africa as a whole.
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