Political unity at a European Union level has always been a tricky concept — obtained usually by talking through the night at summits in Brussels and wearing the protagonists down — and the introduction of majority voting, such as used in the European Council last year to introduce refugee quotas for EU member states, makes political unity even harder to achieve.

The idealistic EU has pretensions of solidarity at a European level but the brutal truth is that, when faced with stark choices, nation states will act in their own selfish interests. We see this increasingly with the migrant crisis, as countries adopt short-notice unilateral solutions to stem or stop the flow of migrants across their borders and expect neighbouring countries to deal with the consequences, and we could see it again if the United Kingdom votes to leave the EU in the 23 June referendum. How could it be anything but in a Europe that is still riven with physical borders and social, cultural, economic