Had the EU been faced with sustained intellectual scrutiny and widespread criticism, some errors might have been avoided. Now European intellectual elites too often find comfort in politics of fear. The humdrum refrains linking Brexit to the rise of fascism and the 1930s provide welcome moral legitimacy to institutions whose political legitimacy is faltering. What better way of banishing the ghost of the EU’s failures — the unemployed and the underemployed, the hopelessness of a whole generation of southern Europeans, the humiliation of Greece, the antidemocratic institutions — than to think that only you stand between Europe and a new Machtergreifung? Or, as Guy Verhofstadt implied in an interview on Radio 4 recently, that EU citizenship is necessary to be part of “European civilisation”? He was echoing Donald Tusk’s comment that Brexit would threaten “Western political civilisation”.

Fixing the EU’s original constitutional errors was never going to be easy. But in this intellectual climate of irrationality and fear, it would be difficult to embark upon ordinary reform, let alone re-found the project on different premises. Alarmingly, the gap between public opinion and intellectual opinion is widening. According to the Pew Research Centre, in all major European countries there is a clear majority supporting the repatriation of powers from Brussels. Yet, in the latest high-profile initiative — the appeal for a “March for Europe” in Rome to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome — 300 European intellectuals and academics are demanding the exact opposite: the transformation of the European Commission “into a fully-fledged government”.

Make no mistake: undemocratic and illiberal politicians are taking advantage of this crisis. Even after Geert Wilders’s unimpressive election results they should not be dismissed lightly. Their support is growing because, as Manent wrote 15 years ago, with the opinion of the media and respectable political parties “nearly unanimously in favour of Europe, almost without reservation”, the other alternative — the defence of democratic nationhood — has been “left to extreme parties that are not quite as respectable”.

Support for European integration almost without reservation has been the default position for most intellectuals and academics — a consensus which has helped to create the conditions for the rise of extreme parties. Too many failed to appreciate that by scorning the nation they were holding democracy in contempt too; that they were allowing the EU to exist in an intellectual space virtually free from serious criticism; that they were bringing democracy into disrepute  with their indifference to the anti-democratic vote in the French Assembly approving the Lisbon Treaty, to the UK Labour government’s betrayal of its manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on that treaty, or to the Greek bailout referendum of 2015.

By putting all the blame for Brexit on the people and none on the EU, they are instrumental in the EU’s perseverance with error. And, in what may be a last-ditch attempt to hold the EU together — through fear rather than consent and hope — they are now enabling a supranational millennialist demagoguery which risks being met only by its national equivalent.