why negotiating with it is not like negotiating with a normal state, but more in some ways (though one should not push this analogy too far) like negotiating with a Supreme Court – the picture Varoufakis paints in his gripping memoirs of his dealings with the EU institutions illustrates their strange character and the mistake we make if we treat it like either a unitary state or an ordinary international grouping .

The key feature of the EU is that the sovereign authority in each state has enacted a certain rather curious kind of constitutional order for each of them, in which a set of principles and institutions are entrenched in a position beyond the reach of conventional, “governmental”, legislation. These principles and institutions are supranational in character, ofa process of intergovernmental negotiation, issuing in changes which no one country can impose upon itself, can alter the essential character of the EU’s constitutional structure. The only thing an individual state can do is repudiate the whole structure – as we are finding out.

Most states on the Continent already had constitutional structures of some sort before the EU was formed, and their politicians were used to operating inside them, just as American politicians are. But the idea that a constitution could not be amended was new to them also – though, and this may be significant, not to German politicians. The German constitution is a legal oddity: the West German constitution, the Grundgesetz , was technically authorised by three of the four powers in the Allied military