But now the inherent flaws are undermining the project. The nations of Europe have been running different kinds of economies and different kinds of democracies, reflecting their diverse histories, values and cultures. If you jam diverse economic cultures into a single currency, you’re bound to get an explosion.

At this moment of crisis, it is obvious how little moral solidarity undergirds the European pseudostate. Americans in Oregon are barely aware when their tax dollars go to Americans in Arizona. We are one people with one shared destiny. West Germans were willing to pay enormous subsidies to build the former East Germany. They, too, are one people.

But that shared identity doesn’t exist between Germans and Greeks, or even between French and Germans. It was easy to be European when it didn’t cost anything. When sacrifices are necessary, the European identity dissolves away.

The mess threatens to bring down the European project and European economies. It threatens to send the world into another global recession. (At this point, Chancellor Angela Merkel has more influence over President Obama’s re-election chances than Obama himself does.)

On a superficial level, the fault lies with the current European leadership, their addiction to inadequate patches and fudges. But the real problems emerge from the technocratic mind-set, from the arrogant gray men who believe they can engineer society, oblivious to history, language, culture, values and place.

And the final curse is that while building Europe in this way was a mistake, Europeans cannot now simply reverse course. If the euro was immediately dissolved, the Deutschmark would surge, nearly every other currency would plummet and the imbalances would create a global catastrophe.

In the short term, the European Central Bank, the stable European nations and even the U.S. will have to take extremely big and painful action to stabilize the situation. But, after that, it’ll be a time for chastening. It’ll be time to discard the technocratic mind-set that created this inherently flawed architecture and build a Europe that reflects the organic realities of those diverse societies.

Thinking back on all the complacent conversations I used to have in Brussels, I was struck by a quotation I read this week in The Economist. A European central banker said he had always wondered how Europe’s leaders could have stumbled into World War I. “From the middle of a crisis,” he said recently, “you can see how easy it is to make mistakes.”