were fully aware that close economic integration and a common currency would only be viable if continual progress were made in integrating government and sovereignty. See Delors and Prodi in this respect. They made the dubious judgement that everyone would see the need for this, and that the political will to do so would gradually emerge.

Two problems then arose :

• first, a generation of political midgets, with no willingness to sacrifice anything whatever for "Europe", and apparently no understanding that the benefits of the Euro etc. were not free.
  
• second : a reaction from the European left which perceived further European integration as a free-marketer plot designed to strip away their hard-won rights and liberties.

The result was the crappy constitutional treaty, and the disaster of its rejection in 2005.

I have no idea whether the approval of the European constitution  would have, in itself, equipped us to better deal with the current crisis. But we would surely have been in another dynamic in these intervening years, and at least psychologically less resistant to doing what needs to be done to save the house from burning down.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}