In the aftermath of a British vote to leave the European Union, French wine and Greek cheese would still be available in the shops. Budget airlines would still fly to continental destinations through skies that would not have fallen down.

Campaigners for a vote to Remain warn that Brexit is hazardous but there would be no overnight calamity, only shock and political frenzy. The prime minister might resign. Markets would move. There would be great disappointment too, felt as a sharp sting by pro-Europeans but also as a slow burn by sceptics. Remainers would get over their defeat while the leavers would spend years mining fresh grievances from the newly blasted quarry of their victory.

The first betrayals would flow quickly as the government began negotiating its way back through tiers of European cooperation: access to the single market; protections for UK workers and pensioners in other member states; cross-border policing and security collaboration; the whole edifice of legal harmonisation that allows people and goods to flow unimpeded from one member state to another. No serious advocate of Brexit denies that a partial Bre-entry would follow. Yet none can agree how far to go back in, nor how much to pay for the privilege.

We expect our allies to indulge us as we divert them from epoch-defining movement of refugees and Russian aggression

Emulating the Norwegian or Swiss models would require compromise in terms of contribution to the EU budget, acceptance of Brussels-derived regulations and porosity of borders. Any combination of those would so dilute the severance package advertised to British voters as to constitute grievous misselling.

The leavers assert that the UK, with its vast pool of consumers for European exports, would be in a strong negotiating position. Maybe so, but the hand would be no stronger than the one David Cameron held when striking his renegotiation deal last week. Other EU leaders were mindful of the need to accommodate some British demands. They did not want to provoke a response that might exacerbate a simmering European crisis of confidence and cohesion.

The dynamic in post-referendum exit talks would be quite different. Britain would have spurned a hard-won deal and aggravated the crisis anyway. The economic leverage that Cameron (or his successor) brought to the table would be offset by a collapse in diplomatic goodwill. The jilted council would need to ensure, through punitive exit terms, that the first state ever to leave the EU would also be the last.

That a Brexit vote might provoke a less than conciliatory response in other European capitals is taken by hardline sceptics as proof that the whole enterprise is an Anglophobe plot. The argument appears to be that friends who refuse to re-open a door once it has been slammed angrily in their faces are not true friends after all, which in turn just goes to show that slamming doors is the most effective way to deal with them; it’s the only language they understand.

This peculiar reasoning flows from a long-standing refusal to accept that “Europe”, as a political process, is something that participants run collectively for their mutual advantage, as opposed to something that 27 alien nations do to Britain, and which we put up with because we lack the gumption to do anything else.

There are solid historical, geographical and cultural reasons why the UK’s conception of European partnership is sceptical and semi-detached. Only a tiny minority of British Europhiles are animated by the project’s founding ideal: economic interdependence, leading to elision of borders as the antidote to murderous nationalism. For most, it is a transactional affair, and one in which the apparatus of political union feels too clunky for the commercial purpose it is meant to serve.

Conservative MP David Davis speaks at a rally held by the Grassroots Out. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

Yet even the least romantic, most mercantile perspective on the EU recognises that it is not some economic drop-in centre where the decision to attend has no bearing on other members. It is founded on multilateral treaties whose genesis was not pain-free. Britain is not the only country with EU-related dilemmas, or where politicians must strike a balance between what they think is strategically necessary and electorally viable.

Yet we expect our allies to be relaxed, indulgent even, as we divert them from other problems: an epoch-defining movement of refugees across the continent; Russian territorial aggression; aftershocks of the last financial crisis; perhaps early tremors of the next one. We hijack the agenda with our demands for special treatment in exchange for … what, exactly? The good fortune to have us still in the club. Maybe. Subject to a referendum.

Our collective responsibility in that vote reaches beyond these islands. Compared to David Cameron, other EU leaders do not have as much invested in the deal that was struck last week, but they are still exposed. A British rejection of membership on revised terms would be a symbolic detonation of inter-governmental compromise as the EU’s vehicle for crisis management, and a potential trigger for nationalistic and populist contagion elsewhere.

It would not even neutralise those forces at home. The leave campaign channels appetites that cannot be met by technical changes to the terms on which Britain exchanges goods, services and people with the rest of Europe. If the UK votes to quit the EU, it will be an expression of economic and political frustration for which Brussels has long been a convenient scapegoat, and which cannot therefore be dissipated by a ritual slaughter of treaty obligations.

Any workable application of a Brexit vote would end up looking like a partial reconstruction of EU membership. Then each segment of the coalition for leave would feel betrayed, one by one. The Tory libertarians would complain that not enough regulation had been scrapped; the hard left would find corporate capitalism still rampant; Ukip nativists would see no sudden restoration of ethnic homogeneity to the streets. The disparate pot of resentments, heated and stirred through the long campaign against “Europe”, would break and its contents flow into other political vessels and causes.

That is the tragedy of this referendum. So much is at stake. A European alliance, decades in the making, could be undermined with no obvious economic or political benefits in exchange. And no option on the ballot paper can satisfy all the people for whom the whole destructive campaign has been arranged. The leavers may get what they vote for and still never get what they want.