Like other declining empires, the EU finds itself suppressing internal opposition. What is notable is the combination of the nature of the dissent, and the environment in which it operates. The EU is driven to relabel its democracy to justify its rearguard fight.

All progressive changes in the EU - whether Brexit, the two emergences of the True Finns, the development of various “pirate-movements“, the strengthening of sovereign identity in Hungary, the Czech Republic and so forth - have taken place in a relatively undramatic ways and through the routine course of civic democracy. So there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the further decay will continue the same way.

The raison d’être of the EU made sense some half-a-century ago, but does not exist anymore. Keeping the peace on the Continent failed in Ukraine, Georgia, the Balkans, Trans-Caucasus; and massive terrorism is a war de facto. With the strictly egoistic interests of individual countries in play, accompanied by a certain set of historical accidents, the Commission is no longer fit for purpose.

Take for starters the existence of the Single Currency. Sitting outside the definition of economist Robert Mundell’s “optimum area", it makes the fragile status of the broad European economy, and specifically its uncompetitiveness, worse. The discriminatory application of Maastricht criteria serves the minority of the EU, and contributes towards “unfair business practices“ (after all: many EU members’ statistical authorities simply lie).

Meanwhile the system itself discriminates against corrective free speech. Political correctness, and the EU generically labelling critical democratic forces as “extremist“, “far Right“ (or “far Left“), both lead to self-alienation through their nomenclature. Ministers who meanwhile stand up for sovereign rights and democratic concerns against the centre are subject to abuse and attack.

Finally, the ideological constraints on the use of police forces (a wariness to act against truly extremist circles at the risk of being labelled “racist,“ or the refusal to prosecute illegal economic migrants as simply illegals) has become an additional risk element.