Instead, eurocrats are determinedly doing the opposite. Integration wasn't working, so they have decreed more integration, demanding that monetary union be buttressed by fiscal union. Debt levels are excessive, so they have created more debt, forcing loans on to countries that are already overwhelmed by their existing liabilities. Countries are struggling to meet the costs of their state bureaucracies, so they have replicated those costs at Brussels level, increasing the EU budget under the guise of stimulus spending. For two years now, Eurocrats have been doling out great spoonfuls of the medicine that sickened the patient in the first place.

What the devil are they thinking? Their attempts to prop up the euro fly in the face of every economic theory, Left or Right. In the best case scenario, that is, where the euro doesn't collapsein chaos, they will have condemned the peoples of the Mediterranean to a generation of deflation, poverty and unemployment, and those of northern Europe to massive tax rises. Do they truly not understand where they are going wrong?

The question is perhaps best answered by quoting Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The EU has always fed, to a greater extent that is generally supposed, on a sense of inevitability. People might not like ceding their democratic rights to Brussels but, as long as they believe that there is no alternative, they resign themselves to the process.

The unravelling of monetary union would call the entire project into question, and thus the jobs of several fonctionnaires. Those fonctionnaires are accordingly ready to pay any price to hold the euro together or, rather, to get the rest of us to pay, since EU employees are exempt from national taxation. An idealistic euro-integrationist, who thinks he is supporting peace and brotherhood, might be relied on to support the project when pushed. But a euro-apparatchik, for whom the EU is a question of mortgage payments and school fees, will fight for it as fiercely as a Gaddafi loyalist following his chief into the desert.