You heard it at TEDxKrakow first. Now even top EU people are saying it:

16 November 2010 Last updated at 11:38

The European Union is in a "survival crisis" over eurozone debt problems, the EU Council president has warned.

Speaking hours before eurozone ministers meet to address threats to the bloc’s economic stability, Herman Van Rompuy said that if the euro failed, so too would the EU.

Even the EU Budget is getting stuck, as ‘some member states’ rightly stand firm against the greedy European Parliament, which is rudely using the issue to get its foot further through the door of taking real decisions about such matters:

Commenting on the failed budget talks, the UK Economic Secretary to the Treasury Justine Greening said MEPs had "wanted to agree extra powers for future budgets, on terms which had no place in a negotiation on the 2011 budget".

"This is something the UK, and other member states, would simply not agree to. We tried to get a deal but, in the end, no deal is better than a bad deal for the UK taxpayer."

MEPs blamed government diplomats – the EU Council – for the breakdown.

"The diplomats around the table are not willing to have a dialogue," said Polish MEP Sidonia Jedrzejewska.

Back in the distant past of the mid-1990s, senior US economist Martin Feldstein warned (to howls of liberal derision) that the creation of the Eurozone could cause conflict(s) in Europe – too many doubtful policy judgements were being made for the sake of an overly ambitious political project:

War within Europe itself would be abhorrent but not impossible. The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce long-standing animosities based on history, nationality, and religion. Germany’s assertion that it needs to be contained in a larger European political entity is itself a warning. Would such a structure contain Germany, or tempt it to exercise hegemonic leadership?

A critical feature of the EU in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw. This is a marriage made in heaven that must last forever.

But if countries discover that the shift to a single currency is hurting their economies and that the new political arrangements also are not to their liking, some of them will want to leave. The majority may not look kindly on secession, either out of economic self-interest or a more general concern about the stability of the entire union.

The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits.

Could the anguish arising from one or more countries crashing from the Eurozone create openings for new (or, worse, nasty but latterly dormant) radical political life-forms, allowing conflicts to develop both within and between some EU countries?

My TEDxKrakow presentation suggested that within the lifetime of people in the audience – but maybe even within weeks – the EU as currently constituted would give way to Something Else.

The risk now as the political and financial contradictions accumulate is that the EU’s political elites will make far-reaching policy blunders as they try to maintain the current wobbly arrangements – and their own reputations.

The fascinating policy challenge is this. Even if (say) some EU leaders think the current arrangemements will have to change radically and have a sense of what could be better instead, no-one will want to be first in calling the present system dead for fear of being blamed for prompting a crisis no-one can control.

However, maybe it’s better to have a crisis under more or less controlled conditions?

And there will be potentially huge ‘first mover advantage’ for the leader(s) who first lays down a possible new model, thereby defining the issues in the nervous public eye.

So a febrile game of chicken could unfold, as EU leaders eye each other uneasily.

No-one wants to be the one blamed for shooting the EU.

No-one wants to be left holding the dead body.

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Update  No call for alarm! (Why is it that when anyone says that it sounds somehow … alarming?)