If there is any good thing that has come from one of the bleakest weeks in the history of the European Union, it is a realisation that, for good and ill, it is part of the fabric of our lives. We complain about it, we even hate it at times, but we have come to take it for granted.
The depth of the shock and distress felt by many people in the UK, especially the young, has brought home the surprising extent to which the EU defined their sense of who they are. For many British people, Brexit has been a source of something like grief.
And which of us ever thought we would live to see a spontaneous demonstration of young people outside the houses of parliament in Westminster waving placards that said “We love EU”? The essence of the EU was, surely, to be unloved.
This in itself is both an opportunity for, and a challenge to, the EU’s leadership. Events have proven a negative - that the EU is very hard to leave. But it would be a potentially fatal error for the EU leadership at this point to take their cue from the chaos and agony of the UK’s decision to leave. It may be very tempting for them to sit back and watch the political, social and economic turmoil that has followed the Brexit and utter a smug “We told you so”.
But “stick with nurse for fear of something worse” is not a programme that will save the EU. Apart from anything else, the Brexit debate showed that it does not work – fear, in sharply divided societies where huge numbers of people feel they have little to lose, is a weak glue. It does not in itself stop things from falling apart. Only hope can do that.
And the challenge for the EU leadership is to inject hope into its project. The EU has come, over the last decade, to be associated in the mind of its citizens with crisis, austerity and, in extreme cases, with relentless punishment for past sins.
It has allowed itself to be brutally divided between creditors and debtors, a good north and a bad south, the thriving rich and the ever more desperate poor. Too often it has managed to seem at once hectoring and incapable, a technocracy manifesting a confidence in its own rightness that is entirely unjustified by its record of solving problems and reacting to crises.
The survival of the EU will ultimately hang on the answer to a single question. Is the EU perceived by its citizens as a shelter from the insecurities and anxieties of a relentless globalisation? Or is it experienced by those citizens as a mere facilitator of those same forces?
If it is the latter, it cannot hold – citizens will look for other shelters and the ones to hand are their familiar nation states. The lure, however false, of retreat under the comfort blanket of national independence could prove to be as strong in many other nations as it has done in England.
There is no great mystery about what the EU needs to do in order to recapture the sense that it is one of the great hopes for human progress. It must refocus rigorously and unapologetically on social justice and equality.
It is inequality, both as a present reality and an ever-starker prospect, that is undermining the authority of all political systems in the democratic world. It fuels racism, xenophobia and the despair that morphs all too easily into self-destructive recklessness. The EU will either stand firmly against it or fall because of it.