“Perhaps future historians will consider Maastricht a decisive step towards the emergence of a stable, European-wide power. Yet there is another, darker possibility?.?.?.?The effort to bind states together may lead, instead, to a huge increase in frictions among them. If so, the event would meet the classical definition of tragedy: hubris (arrogance), ate (folly); nemesis (destruction).”

I wrote the above in the Financial Times almost 20 years ago. My fears are coming true. This crisis has done more than demonstrate that the initial design of the eurozone was defective, as most intelligent analysts then knew; it has also revealed – and, in the process, exacerbated – a fundamental lack of trust, let alone sense of shared identity, among the peoples locked together in what has become a marriage of inconvenience.

The extent of the breakdown was not brought home to me by the resignation of Germany’s Jürgen Stark from the board of the European Central Bank, nor by the looming Greek default, nor by new constraints imposed by the German constitutional court. What brought it home to me was a visit to Rome.