‘I WORRY I might have just become an anti-European,” a friend in Inverness posted on social media yesterday. “I think it was the point at which the question of whether a country privatised its national assets or not ceased to become a valid one, and the question of whether the proceeds of those sales be held in a notorious tax haven became legitimate.”

By most political calculations my friend is a nailed on Europhile. He supports the Greens, voted Yes in September, never complains about political correctness “going mad”.

But recent events in Greece have started to make him reconsider. I doubt he is alone.

The agreement reached between Alexis Tsipras and eurozone leaders hardly qualifies as a “deal”. If anything, the terms are considerably worse than those rejected by Greek voters in last weekend’s referendum. Far from strengthening his hand, that victory left the Syriza leader even more exposed, desperate to remain in the Euro, and without any plan B.

Brussels (and Frankfurt) and are effectively in control of the Greek economy, and its government, too. The extent of the ceding of power is so great that even deciding the number of pharmacies in Greece will now be beyond the Athens parliament’s purview. Journalist Paul Mason, the steadiest guide through the tumult of recent weeks, compared the deal to a “sanctions regime”.

The core question over recent weeks was whether the democratic will expressed by Greek voters would be able to overcome the technocratic force of the Troika. That has been answered, and answered emphatically. TINA. There is no alternative.

An interview in the New Statesman with Yanis Varoufakis was revealing. Varoufakis, until last week the Greek minister for finance, recounts objecting when Donald Tusk, European Council President, tried to issue a group communiqué without him.

“How could Tusk exclude a member state?” Varoufakis asked. The reply came from a lawyer: “The Eurogroup does not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened this group.”

There, in a sentence, lies the nub of the democratic deficit at the heart of the European Union. A cabal with no accountability takes decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of European citizens. Meetings are not even minuted.

So where does that leave the likes of my friend in Inverness, thousands of miles away from the European corridors of power?

Scotland traditionally is more pro-European than the rest of the UK, according to social attitudes surveys. But I’ve often wondered if the depth of our collective amour for Europe is overstated, as much a product of English squeamishness towards the continent as any approval for the European Parliament’s diktats.

Scotland’s Europhilia was borne, in part, of external pressures. In the 1980s, the vision of European social democracy offered a bulwark against Thatcherism.

While the award of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the EU was roundly scoffed, European integration transcended the ideological, nationalist and ethnic schisms that blighted the continent for centuries.

The organisation that began life sixty years earlier as the European Coal and Steel Community changed the face of Europe – for good.

The problem now is that the terms of the game have shifted. Wolfgang Münchau, a columnist at the notorious far-left pamphlet The Financial Times, described Germany’s behaviour over the weekend as “regime change in the eurozone.” Europe will never be the same again.

So where does that leave this sceptered isle? A few months ago, the UK referendum on Europe looked a foregone conclusion. Ukip and the Tory Eurosceptic right would line up against it; in Scotland, the SNP would lead the campaign for staying in the European Union.

Scottish nationalists would vote Yes en masse. Now the situation looks rather different.

Nicola Sturgeon once spoke of the UK’s EU referendum perhaps providing the “material change” needed for another vote on independence.

This assumption of Scottish support for Europe may prove correct, but before casting a ballot on our European future perhaps it might be time for a dialogue on what kind of EU we want.