Why borders matter

There is no better way of discrediting an opinion than by attributing it to a psychological quirk or peculiarity. The task is then not to refute it, but to explain it away by reference to its murky psychic origins. For a number of years, doubt about the wisdom of a European project (whose end can only be seen as through a glass, darkly) was attributed by its enthusiasts to precisely such a quirk: one that combined some of the features of mental debility, arachnophobia and borderline personality disorder. One would not be altogether surprised to learn that the European Union had sent lobbyists to Washington to have Euroscepticism included in the forthcoming revised version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as a new diagnostic category.

By now, even the most convinced European projectors (to use a Swiftian term) must have noticed that their project is not going swimmingly.