Things are now very nearly out of control. There is a runaway engine and no driver. Just as in the birth of the United States, when the founding fathers used opaque words to reconcile the issue of state sovereignty to secure agreement when there was none, so European politicians have pressed forward to ever closer union with neither the mandate nor the structures to enable it.
Worse they have set up a common currency without a common economic and fiscal policy and without the levers of management available to ensure it can function. The political vacuum and the financial confusion are now spinning round each other, while the players try to control events by futile declarations which mean nothing and action plans with no action.
Europe, so recently a massive political and cultural success, now looks a mess. It has a Parliament with no power, in the euro area are seventeen sovereign governments, then there is a non elected Commission, plus three Presidents, but absolutely no means of managing the present crisis or the political will to do so. Moreover its populations are now getting fed up. Any new treaty to create the kind of centralised economic government essential to the survival of the euro, will fail to be ratified in at least some the seventeen countries in which the significant loss of sovereignty would apply.
Meanwhile Greece is going bust and Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are in various stages of financial trauma. The whole thing is now in such a tangle that measures which could have worked six months ago no longer will. What started as a problem of Greek economic management has become a crisis which threatens not only the Euro, but the European Union and the world economy. If anything good emerges at the end and there is no certainty of that, it will look a good deal different to the rudderless confusion now presenting such a dreadful historic spectacle.
Meanwhile Eurosceptics must be feeling vindicated. The trouble is, when a ship goes down, those nearby in the water are sucked under too.