It looks like it’s going to take a keen eye to handicap the negotiations that are taking place between Britain and Europe in respect of Brexit. Particularly because the early maneuvers may give the false impression that the Brits have been back-footed by wily Brussels bureaucrats.

Not so, is my prediction from the rocky outcrop of Nova Scotia, whence we watch Brexit. While each eyes its counterpart warily, testing for strengths and weaknesses in opposing strategies, the Europeans outside the room offer the hints of the EU’s future. The first telling signs come from its strongest member state, Germany.

It turns out that the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry, representing more than 3 million businesses and entrepreneurs, is worried about the impact of Brexit upon prospective trade. (No doubt the same concern is fermenting among the other 26 EU members.) German exports to the UK were down 3% last year, igniting fears of a post-Brexit slump.

The spokesman for the commerce and industry chambers, Thomas Renner, is quoted by HuffPost UK as saying that an association “survey shows that 40% of German companies expect less trading with UK after Brexit and almost 10% plan relocations of investments from UK.” Citing DIHK numbers, HuffPo reports that “about 750,000 jobs in Germany depend on trade with the UK, and about 2,200 German companies have branches in the UK employing about 400,000 people.” It adds: “About 1,400 British companies have branches in Germany, which employ about 250,000 people.”

Germany’s auto industry is one key player anxious over Brexit negotiations, with 800,000 cars or one fifth of output exported to the UK last year. “Businesses are concerned that Brexit will lead to more trade barriers — additional bureaucracy, increased waiting time and stricter border controls thus higher costs,” says Mr. Brenner. “A free trade agreement would help to reduce the impact of trade barriers in general, but this only a mild instrument compared to full-fledged membership of the European Single Market.”

While German manufacturers fear for their trading relationship with Britain, the other EU heavy hitter, France, relishes a dust-up. France is pursuing a scorched earth negotiating strategy against Brexit, often running counter to the interests of its European colleagues. “Never before have two parties seeking a new trade agreement begun with the advantages of complete regulatory equivalence and a zero tariff environment,” Britain’s international trade minister Liam Fox told a Washington audience last week. “Our challenge is not primarily economic, but practical and political.”

One former EU trade commissioner, Karel De Gucht, confirms as much, telling the BBC it is “a fantasy” to believe that Britain can have access to the single market and transact trade deals independent of EU membership. “You will have to live up to the rules of the internal market, and you cannot strike trade deals with any other party,” Mr. De Gucht said. Furthermore, he explained that the remaining EU member countries “are not going to enter into a trade deal that is giving all kind of possibilities to Great Britain to compete from the outside.”

This begs the question: If greater entrepreneurial opportunity, economic prosperity, and overall individual well-being are its stated aims, why is the EU a stumbling block to members’ aspirations?

The EU hierarchy is willfully oblivious to the rigors of the market and what Ludwig von Mises called “the democracy of the market,” where “consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite.” In its stead, Brussels has substituted bureaucratic fiat and coercive regulatory oversight. Not to put too fine a point on it, the European Union is putting its own interests — and pride — ahead of those of its member states.

“I would differentiate between European and EU. The EU is a political organization, Europe is a continent with sovereign nations,” Dr. Fox cautions. “And I think this argument that is often put forward that the EU is synonymous with Europe is to fail to grasp that real global reality.”

At the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Soviet communism had conquered the East — only, it turns out, to collapse in upon itself by the late 1980s, a victim of NATO military strength but more especially of the example of economic wealth and personal freedom unleashed by reforms set in motion by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Yet in that same period another curtain was hoisted under the guise of European unity and cooperation. Now Brexit offers Europe a path toward freedom.