A party sign attached to a wall at the UK Independence Party annual conference on September 26, 2015 in Doncaster, England | Getty Opinion The EU doesn’t need Britain Brexit is a migraine for London, not Brussels.

In all the talk of Brexit, and what it would mean for Britain, we have lost sight of the fact that British membership of the European Union is not a sine qua non for the EU’s robust survival. For the EU’s leaders, a British renegotiation may be an unwelcome addition to an already long list of tribulations, but it is far from an existential matter.

Germany’s former foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is wrong to see the prospect of Brexit, layered on top of the risks posed by the financial crisis in Greece, as “the greatest danger that Europe has faced since the Cold War’s end.” The renegotiation is what the British and their European counterparts make of it. If it is not botched or clouded by mutual animosity, it may be a good opportunity to introduce more flexibility into the EU’s architecture.

But whether the U.K. stays or leaves changes little for the future of the European project. That hinges on whether European leaders succeed in fixing the EU’s woefully inadequate governance. For the Eurozone to survive, it will be necessary to create an effective platform for tighter coordination of fiscal policy and structural reforms. Furthermore, as the events in Greece have shown, such a platform will need to be seen as legitimate and democratic by Europeans, and not as a technocratic imposition.

The EU also needs to fix its broken border protection, immigration, and asylum system — or rather, the motley array of 28 different systems operating across its member states — in a way that does not turn the continent into a fortress, without producing a populist xenophobic backlash.

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If the British do not want to take part in the European political union, they should be allowed to keep the perks of their current EU membership, including the participation in the single market, without having to adopt the single currency and surrender more of their national sovereignty. The U.K. should also be allowed — as even the European Court of Justice ruled recently — to restrict access to their welfare systems to discourage “benefit tourism.”

While there must be some flexibility, the EU is ultimately not a dessert trolley, from which member states pick their favorite treats. It is, European leaders need to explain to David Cameron, a bundle of political commitments, including the EU’s four fundamental freedoms. And should he insist on a permanent opt-out from the freedom of movement of people, by requiring that the U.K. keep control over its border, Cameron’s continental counterparts would be justified in showing him the door.

While Brexit would not be an economic catastrophe for the U.K., it would not solve any of the problems that the British have with the EU, and would create new ones instead. If the U.K. left, its government would most likely try to retain access to the single market through some version of the agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA).

British companies would then have to bear much of the burden of European regulations anyway, without any say in what those regulations looked like. As the Norwegian political scientist Erik Eriksen noted about the experience of his own country — which is part of the EEA but not the EU — “Norwegians must wait in the corridor when decisions are being made that affect them.” Non-membership in the EU gives Norway less self-determination, not more.

Brexit would likely reopen the question of Scotland’s independence, where EU membership enjoys wide support. And even if the Scots decided to stay British, an ‘independent’ U.K. would likely lose much of its clout on the world stage, which is largely a function of its ability to shape the EU’s common foreign and security policy.

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But those are questions for British voters to ponder. What matters for the EU is that a Brexit should not serve as a template for others to follow. Whereas the U.K. can continue its enviable tradition of parliamentary democracy outside the EU, the same is not true for many continental nations, where similar breakdowns of political cooperation between countries have produced catastrophic outcomes in the past.

Of course, it would be nice if the British decided to stick around and pushed the bloc towards pro-market reforms. But in reality the U.K. is no more a harbinger of free-market Anglo-Saxon capitalism than, say, Denmark, or Germany. And the renegotiations of its place in the EU should not serve as a distraction from the much greater challenge that faces EU’s leaders. Their task is to build a federal system that works and is democratic. That, and not UKIP or Tory backbenchers, should be on the mind of Angela Merkel and her colleagues.

Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He tweets at @daliborrohac.