In this state of oblivion and confusion, all appeals to national sovereignty and democratic self-government become suspect. If we go along with them, descent into fascism will be all but unstoppable, as Philippe Sands seems to suggest in a recent review of Laurence Rees’s The Holocaust. Sands recalls Primo Levi’s pithy summary of the logic of fascism: once most people manifest the belief that “every stranger is an enemy”, that belief will become the major premise of a syllogism and “at the end of the chain, there is the Lager”. Sands assimilates the Leave campaign’s souverainiste language of taking back control to the major premise in that syllogism. But in doing so, he misunderstands Levi’s point about the distinctive nature of fascism. And it bears recalling that Levi joined the partisans as a member of the Partito d’Azione, which had its origins in the 19th-century liberal nationalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi. The idea of a chain of inference linking Garibaldi to Goebbels — and the concentration camps — would have horrified him.

Another reason for the failure of Böckenförde’s, Manent’s, and Siedentop’s prescient analyses to resonate more widely in the European intellectual sphere is that faith in technocracy has replaced faith in democracy. In the field of EU studies, no one embodies this trend better than the Princeton academic Andrew Moravcsik. When Siedentop’s book came out, he dismissed it as having a “whiff of Oxford high-table history” and teaching us “very little” about the future of the EU.

Confronted with the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by both the French and the Dutch in 2005, Moravcsik insisted that the problem of democratic legitimacy, which was then troubling the electorates too, was exaggerated. “Far from demonstrating that the European Union is in decline or disarray or in desperate need of democratic reform” — he asserted — “the crisis demonstrates its fundamental stability and legitimacy.” As late as April last year, Moravcsik wrote that the Brexit referendum lacked “real significance” because “the government would probably do just what EU members . . . have always done after such votes. It would negotiate a new agreement, nearly identical to the old one, disguise it in opaque language and ratify it. The public, essentially ignorant about Europe, always goes along.”

Even those who accept that something is wrong with EU institutions are for the most part only prepared to admit that some change to the “administrative-technocratic” structure can fix the problem. Coralie Delaume (a journalist) and David Cayla (an economist) do not agree. In their La fin de l’Union Européenne (Michalon, €19), which is causing a stir on the other side of the Channel, they argue that the “democratic deficit” cannot be “corrected with some clever institutional bricolage”. Indeed, the problem runs deeper. The European project was constituted in an undemocratic way, premised on the transfer of legislative functions to unrepresentative institutions whose powers grew and grew over time.

Clement Attlee saw this clearly from the outset. In 1950 he rejected British participation in the Schuman Plan with these words: “We have always been willing, and are now, to enter into . . . international arrangements, but the point of this plan was that it was something entirely different from the international arrangements. This was to set up a supra-national authority.” An authority, he added, that is “utterly undemocratic and is responsible to nobody”.