Perhaps most damning of all is that the euro has justified the humiliation of Europe’s South, Greece especially. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit argued that a decent political society is one in which institutions do not humiliate. In the eyes of many Europeans the EU now fails this basic test of political decency. One of the faces of this failure is Martin Schulz, former President of the European Parliament and unanimously elected leader of Germany’s SPD in March. After the Greek referendum he said that it was time for a “government of technocrats” to replace those in Athens who had defied Brussels. Yet, far from reviling him as an anti-democrat, Europe’s intelligentsia seems to have already crowned Schulz as the face of the EU’s post-Brexit future.

The euro may have worked for Germany in an economic sense, but it has not solved its identity problems. Far from it. In another recent contribution to the debate on Europe, The End of Europe (Yale, £18.99), James Kirchick — who, unlike Delaume and Cayla, laments the possibility that the EU may collapse — writes an insightful chapter on Germany’s identity crisis. The post-war Germany of the Rhine founded by Adenauer has been shifting its pivot eastward. With the election of an American President who seems more than happy to reciprocate Germany’s growing disaffection towards the United States, Kirchick may be right to think that Germany will find itself tempted to reconsider its Westbindung and explore a new Sonderweg.

The election of Trump has prompted the rediscovery of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here — a dystopian political novel in which a fascist defeats Roosevelt in 1936. The protagonist, a newspaper editor called Doremus Jessup, is struck by a realisation: “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t the primary fault of Big Business, nor the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

The EU is no tyranny or dictatorship. But democracy is in crisis in Europe. True, the blame does not lie only with the EU: according to recent polling for the Journal of Democracy, youth disaffection with democracy runs high in EU and non-EU democracies alike. The post-referendum myth of an idealist British youth outvoted by a cynical older generation, however, may need some revisiting now that we know that only 30 per cent of under-35s in Britain think it is “essential” to live in a democracy, as opposed to 75 per cent of those born in the 1930s. Europe is less well-placed to deal with this crisis, divided as it is between supranational institutions that are at best undemocratic and increasingly anti-democratic, and national institutions that have lost so much authority that they fail to command respect. Conscientious, respectable but lazy-minded pundits have not acquiesced in the rise of tyranny, but might they have enabled this dangerous situation to arise?