What remains unavoidable is that Matteo Salvini’s Lega, together with the neo-anarchist Five Star Movement, now dominate Italy’s parliament, and both propose a fiscal blitz in flagrant violation of the EU budget rules and the Fiscal Compact

Europe’s political uprising is shifting to a second front. Once-silent intellectuals are starting to challenge the core assumption of EU ideology, indicting the project for moral vandalism and a reckless attack on the democratic nation state.

It is almost as if a counter "doxa" is emerging in the cultural capitals of the Continent. Theorists and professors are proclaiming the virtues of the nation – the precious liberal nation, inspired by the universal and redemptive values of the French and American revolutions – in a way we have hardly heard in recent times.

They defend it as the only real vehicle of democracy known to man. At its best, it has been an agent of moral progress, an upholder of social solidarity and the rule of law, and a supple manager of ethnic and religious difference. It has been a bulwark against the unforgiving clash of communitarian identities, and should not be discarded lightly.

In the past it has been all too easy for the EU power structure to ridicule eurosceptic dissent as nostalgia, or to blacken it as populist tribalism with ugly undertones – whether the Front National in France, or Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands. British protest could be quarantined as an Anglo-Saxon peculiarity.

These anti-EU movements have tapped into deep cultural feelings but there has been no unifying ideology, no "respectable" doctrine able to draw in moderate opinion. Europe’s intellectual ground has been dominated by a generation of thinkers who dismiss the nation as an tainted relic with no future in a globalised world.
ddenly it now feels like a European Spring. The latest book making waves in France is “La Nation contre le Nationalisme” by Gil Delannoi, a professor at the elite Science Po institute in Paris. His verdict is blistering. The EU is acquiring the form and character of an empire, albeit a soft variant akin to the Heiliges Römisches Reich.

But there is an implacable difficulty: no empire in history has ever been democratic. And the problem with soft empires is that they remain soft only until they meet resistance. At that point they must persist with a despotic logic – and we saw flashes of that in the eurozone crisis – or recoil and release their grip.

Prof Delannoi is not a eurosceptic pamphleteer. He writes forensically as a social scientist, though he mocks the deracinated “nationphobes”, with their “superficial exultation of abstract diversity” as they move from one planetary golden ghetto to another, conflating self-interest with morality.

Just weeks earlier, Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck issued a withering broadside on similar lines, comparing EU’s high-handed treatment of member states to the “colonial administrations” of the Belgian, Dutch, British, or French overseas empires in the inter-war era. These regimes had their show-piece "councils of the people" but real power resided in a remote imperial executive, while repressed anger seethed below.

"There is an implacable difficulty: no empire in history has ever been democratic"

We are perhaps reaching a moment in European affairs where EU evangelists may have to start to defending their moral claims. Mere assertion is no longer enough. This shift in intellectual opinion matters, and it is coming at a time when the existential crisis of the Project is already quickening and spreading.

Alternative fur Deutschland is now the official opposition in the German Bundestag, with all the prerogatives that this entails. It chairs the budget committee. Sovereignty parties are likely to dwarf the establishment Left in the European Parliament in the next election. Once-great socialist movements are crumbling in all the major states of the eurozone, either because they became enforcers of the EU’s Right-wing creditor austerity policies, or because they could no longer hear the higher octaves of national sentiment.

The drive for ever closer union already seems an anachronism, yet monetary union cannot function without such union.

It is in Italy where this confused imperial misadventure must finally end.  Let us for a moment ignore the extraordinary fact that the leader of the biggest coalition bloc in Rome is openly calling the euro a disaster and openly vowing to launch a parallel currency to subvert the European Central Bank.

What remains unavoidable is that Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the neo-anarchist Five Star Movement now dominate Italy’s parliament, and both propose a fiscal blitz in flagrant violation of the EU budget rules and the Fiscal Compact. Five Star may now be courting Brussels but it cannot easily renege of pledges for a universal basic income costing up to 2pc of GDP annually, or disavow its campaign pledge to overthrow labour and pension reforms imposed by Berlin.

A recalcitrant Italian government of whatever stripe is the death knell for Emmanuel Macron’s grand plan to buttress monetary union with an EU budget, an EU finance minister, a European Monetary Fund, and joint bank deposit insurance. Germany is even less likely to underwrite fiscal union – beyond window dressing – if Italy refuses to bring its debt trajectory under control.

The Dutch-led "Hanseatic League” of eight northern and Baltic states has in any case issued its own protest against Mr Macron’s attempt to impose his EU religion on everybody else, insisting that all countries should first put their own fiscal house in order and abide by existing treaty law. Each state must build its own “fiscal buffer” before the cycle turns.

It is as if Europe is back to square one. The euro remains an orphan currency. There is still no fiscal machinery to combat the next crisis. Any rescue under the bail-out fund (ESM) is likely to require sovereign debt restructuring and de facto occupation by EU officials, which no Italian government could accept.

The ECB is nearing the technical and political limits of QE. It is therefore highly likely that Italy will relapse into an insolvency spiral once the next global recession hits. If so, Rome will not submit a second time to German austerity demands. It will take matters into its own hands.

Prof Delannoi notes acidly that it was German intellectuals from the Fifties onwards – Karl Jaspers and Jurgen Habermas – who led the intellectual onslaught against the nation state, successfully capturing Europe’s elite opinion. 

Yet when the Berlin Wall came down the country’s reunification was spontaneously justified on the grounds that Germans of East and West were a single nation artificially divided by occupation – “Wir Sind Ein Volk”. The mask fell.

Prof Delannoi accepts that it is theoretically possible for the EU to become a super-nation in the long run with the attributes of a state but why would you embark on such a risky political venture when a tried and tested model of liberal democratic government already exists. “Utopian or not, this goal is not desired by the crushing majority of Europe,” he said. Let me go further. It is completely deranged.