The EU has 26 other member nations, while the euro zone (or monetary union) has 19 members. That means “19 countries in the euro zone have to agree to the status quo,” says Ali Motamed, founder of Invenomic Capital Management. “If you assume that every one of the 19 nations has a 90% chance of remaining, that means there is an 87% chance that someone will leave.”

For global investors, the battleground moves back to the continent. “If you had a breakup of the euro zone it would be awful,” Motamed says.

Unwinding a transnational currency involving 19 nations would be a colossal undertaking. For the sake of comparison, Brexit will involve negotiations between London and Brussels over an estimated 50,000 separate laws, rules and regulations and, thankfully, currency conversion won’t be one of them since the U.K. has its own.

There are several schools of thought about how events unfold. The first is that Brussels will seek to be as punitive as it can with the U.K. to set a precedent that will spook other EU members and keep them from following the U.K.’s lead. 

But that line of thinking fails to take account of the existing links between the U.K. and the Continent. Just drive around England and one sees a huge percentage of German cars. German Chancellor Angela Merkel knows very well her nation’s exports could suffer from a nasty divorce—just as she understands that all the other EU countries will resent Germany’s increased clout when the second most powerful country is no longer on the scene.

For the overbearing, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Brexit was a warning shot. Nationalist, non-mainstream political parties in France, the Netherlands and other countries have advocated leaving the EU. Most of these parties count many more members and exert more domestic political power than England’s UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) ever did.

Some serious observers of global geopolitics like George Friedman question the very future of the EU itself. A few years ago, “the Brexit vote would have mattered,” Friedman noted at John Mauldin’s Strategic Investment Conference in late May, arguing it was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Built for peace and prosperity in the 1980s and 1990s, the EU is proving itself unable to deal with the world afflicted by debt, demographics and migration issues that emerged after the advent of the euro in 2000. This became particularly evident during the Great Recession. “Europe didn’t know how to respond; it was beyond them. The U.S. did,” he said.

This doesn’t imply that Europe or even the EU institutions will completely collapse. “Somewhere in Geneva, the League of Nations still has an office,” Friedman joked.

For global investors, Europe could well become the world’s sick man once again. According to Memani, EU growth is already slowing down. This means more than ever that investors should look at buying companies, not countries.