The alternative policy — an orderly unbundling of the euro — has never been seriously considered. Had it happened two years ago, a great deal of pain might have been avoided. If it happens now, there will be a cost, but it is still patently the least bad option.

Germany and its satellites could leave the euro tomorrow, establish a hard currency and bequeath the legal carcase of the euro to the Mediterranean states. The peripheral countries would thus devalue, price themselves into the market and receive an immediate stimulus. Their devaluation would probably be accompanied by a partial default (although not necessarily in Italy). Each state would then be free to adopt a monetary policy that suited its own conditions and, while the recovery would be painstaking, at least there would be a recovery.

Eurocrats, though, won’t countenance any challenge to their project. They remind me of the nomenklatura at the end of the 1980s. Even as the revolution overwhelms them, they carry on trotting out the old slogans — European economic government, fiscal federalism, eurobonds. Not in the hope of convincing anyone; not even in the hope of convincing themselves; but simply because they don’t know what else to do.