In 1969, in her seminal work On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross eloquently detailed the five stages of dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. It remains one of the most important contributions to our understanding of the final phase of life and will do much to explain the otherwise baffling lack of self-awareness characterizing European elites’ approach to the entire EU project…

Back in 2005 after the French and Dutch referendum debacles, William Schirano and John Hulsman wrote a doom-laden piece for the US-based The National Interest about the fact that the European Union and its ideals were, in fact, dying.

Watching the latest fevered summitry it is hard not to see Denial, Anger, Bargaining and Depression aplenty. Just quite not enough Acceptance yet?

Perhaps this is understandable. How to accept that something so vast and magnificent is failing, and perhaps giving way to uncertainty and disarray which risk lurching Europe back towards its ghastly past?

Read a version of their famous article here. It’s only some 300 weeks old, but the names of the key players (Blair, Chirac, Schroder) seem to come from a prehistoric age.

Six years on things are, of course, much worse. But their core idea still makes sense:

Simply put, a one-size-fits-all approach does not conform to the modern political realities of the Continent – European countries have politically diverse opinions on all aspects of international life: free trade issues, attitudes toward NATO, relations with the United States and how to organize their own economies.

For example, the Netherlands is a strongly free-trading country, traditionally pro-NATO and proAmerican. France, by contrast, is more protectionist, more skeptical of NATO, more statist in organizing its economy and more competitive in its attitude toward America. Thus the two European renegades actually have very different political cultures  – there simply is no common "European national interest."

The EU should function as a political clubhouse – coordinating an intra-European consensus where one exists...