In every EU state, there is a chasm between what the French call the pays légal (politicians, civil servants, big corporations, diplomats, NGOs) and the pays réel (everyone else). Whenever a new treaty is proposed, it gets the support of around 80 per cent of legislators. But, on the rare occasions that it is put to a referendum, it is thrown out.

The mismatch is perhaps most acute in Germany, whose postwar constitution was designed partly to shield politicians from "populism" (i.e. public opinion). The EU rests, to a far greater extent than anyone likes to admit, on the sufferance of German taxpayers. Indeed, for most of the past 40 years, there were only two net contributors to the budget: Germany in first place and Britain in second. The readiness of Germans to underwrite the whole construction depends, in turn, on an appeal to historical guilt. German opinion-formers and politicians call on this sense frequently, but always indirectly. They talk of "the demons of the past" or of "not returning to history". The reason their appeals have to be phrased elliptically is that, if they were put into plain language — "we have to give more money to Greece or we might find ourselves at war with Poland" — their utter absurdity would be apparent.

I write in no carping spirit. The brand of euroscepticism I have always found most distasteful, as well as most wrong-headed, is the sort that sees the whole project as some kind of German plot. Konrad Adenauer embraced European integration from decent and high-minded motives. A.J.P. Taylor, in one of his essays, defined "the German problem" as one of numbers: because Germans were more populous than any of their neighbours, they would always dominate the Continent unless they were kept divided. Sure enough, between 1648 and 1990, the other European powers repeatedly sundered the German-speaking peoples. When, in 1990, Helmut Kohl announced that German unity and European unity were two sides of the same coin, he meant that the best way for a united Germany to be accepted by its former enemies would be for those former enemies to feel, in some sense, that Germany was their country too.

You can understand why that argument was persuasive to Germans of Kohl's generation. They grew up in a country that was degraded and dishonoured, its infrastructure wrecked, its neighbours hostile. In an incredibly short time, they saw that country accepted into the comity of nations as a prosperous and powerful ally. Europe was the talisman that had somehow effected this transformation. It was, accordingly, beyond argument.