When David Cameron first announced the UK’s referendum on Europe in 2013, the reaction from EU capitals was disdain. Brexit would be a disastrous error for Britain – perhaps suicidal – but Europe would brush off the effects.

As I reported at the time, Spain's foreign minister José Manuel Garcia-Margallo told us that Brexit would lead to "terrible devastation" of our industries, leaving nothing left but "a few petty bankers" in xenophobic isolation.

"David Cameron must understand he cannot slow the speed of the EU cruiser," came the finger-waving admonition from Madrid.

The penny has since begun to drop that Brexit fall-out might be very serious for them as well.

Yet even as recently as this February the prevailing view was still that the referendum saga was largely a British affair, to do with the idiosyncrasies of an island people, or some such peculiarly British pathology, or to do with the post-imperial hang-ups of the English – an irritating canard that inverts the truth, since those Britons with an imperial reflex often rediscover their natural home in the EU power structures.

This was still the view of the policy elites even after the Schengen fire had been raging for months. There was a strange reluctance to accept what has been obvious for a long time, that comparable feelings of irritation with Brussels have been welling in France, Italy, Holland, Scandinavia, and Germany itself.

They still could not see that the EU had over-reached disastrously, or that it had breached the historical contract with Europe’s nation states, or that broader contagion was a mounting threat to their own interests.

David Fuller's view

I think Europe is more divided today than at any time since the 1970s, not despite the EU’s influence but because of it.  However, I also agree with an earlier comment by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard which I quoted on 28^th April:

“You can quarrel with Europe, or you can quarrel with the US, but it is courting fate to quarrel with the whole democratic world at the same time.”

For that reason I am marginally more likely to vote ‘Remain’ in the UK’s referendum on 23^rd June, even though I think the EU is in a downward spiral of its own creation.  Meanwhile, the UK can hopefully continue to provide an element of stability and sensible advice, while also fending off any further intrusions on our sovereignty. 

(See also: Nation states have been the making of Europe, by Alan Sked for The Telegraph on 9^th May 2016.  He is Emeritus Professor of International History at the LSE, and his perspective is interesting.)