The crisis of the European Union is gathering pace, several countries within it face insoluble economic distress, the euro is unlikely to survive this year, a number of banks are technically bankrupt – and what’s been exercising the great men with their hands on destiny? The chocolate bunny made by the famous Swiss firm of Lindt, that’s what.

The great men have been examining this chocolate bunny, and they don’t like the way it is wrapped in gold foil and has a red ribbon round its neck. This is “not sufficiently different,” so they say, from the wrappings of other chocolate products. Apparently Lindt has failed to establish the bunny’s “inherent distinctive character.” And the European Court of Justice accordingly issues a fatwa.

Imagine it. Grown men, highly paid bureaucrats, have laboured through years of committee meetings, travelling from 27 countries to attend, amassing files with pleas and recommendations for and against, when it’s all about concealed protectionism for chocolate bunnies that aren’t as popular as Swiss. Hitherto their masterstroke had been the specification of the permissible curvature of the banana. Ordinary people can respond only with a belly laugh – and this may be the only joyful thing to remember when the death throes of this whole preposterous experiment are over at last.

Until about a century ago, European culture was a standard for the rest of the world to emulate. Now it is moribund or non-existent. Several commentators of the caliber of Niall Ferguson and Mark Steyn have been saying for some time that the game is up for Europe. It jolted me when not long ago a book of Walter Laqueur’s foresaw that the whole continent was turning into nothing but a tourist trap, with museum attendants and gondoliers and the like preserving the past just to live off it. Perhaps it is coincidence, but in the years since the European Union imposed itself nothing of any cultural significance has been produced under its auspices.

I am in Italy where the newspapers convey this sense of dying out. Here’s an issue of the left-wing La Repubblica with one downbeat headline after another: for instance, “Too much sacrifice and little hope,” or “the Economy is to blame for so many human dramas.” One article states that more than 1,000 businesses are closing each month, and another records how the unemployed are committing suicide, leaving notes like this one from a man who hanged himself in Salerno: “I’m afraid of the taxes to be paid, I’m afraid of what’s awaiting me.”

“Americans in Florence” is a wonderful exhibition in the Strozzi palace that gives a glimpse of how very different things were when Europe still mattered for its creativity. At the end of the 19th century American artists came to that city to absorb its culture. John Singer Sargent was one who painted in the great tradition. His portrait of Henry James, bequeathed by James himself to the National Portrait Gallery in London, shows a man of the same stamp, able and willing to be the master of them all. I knew little or nothing of artists such as Frank Duveneck, the Fabbri brother and sister, Frank Weston Benson and others, but the energy with which they threw themselves into everything around them is unmistakable. The thought came to me unbidden that this American interest in human life is the cultural dynamic that Europeans have lost and that Islamists with their vaunted love of death could never know.

Abdul Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, has died a free man in his native Libya. The all-encompassing aura of incompetence and subterfuge on the part of the British authorities will not die with him. British officials from top to bottom gave a textbook example of how not to handle issues between themselves and Middle East tyrannies.

Megrahi’s guilt or innocence was a matter for the British police and courts. Instead the government of Tony Blair allowed the Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddhafi to become involved. The case was then open to haggling behind the scene. Justice no longer depended on facts but on the terms that could be struck with Gaddhafi. Dangling lucrative oil contracts, he obtained the release first of another Libyan accused with Megrahi and finally of Megrahi himself. Lockerbie is in Scotland, and a fiction was arranged that the British government had no say when the Scots conveniently sent Megrahi to Libya. A final deal had been struck whereby he obtained freedom in return for withdrawing the appeal for another trial that might have proved his innocence. Adding insult to injury, the three months the doctors gave him to live before his cancer proved fatal turned into three years. By that time, Gaddhafi was dead, and British arms had helped to kill him.

The net result of this episode is that Britain looks venal if not dishonest, shameful, and totally confused between surrender to a Third World dictator and overpowering him. And the families of those murdered in the Lockerbie bombing can be sure only that they have been betrayed.

The level of unreality created by the masters of Europe is reaching new heights. It is like hallucinating to observe the politicians driving in expensive cars to meet one another, inspecting guards of honor, arranging for ministerial get-togethers, and all the while the construct that put them into office is collapsing all around them. These same politicians chatter extensively about saving the euro and the European Union, about bailouts and firewalls and fiscal pacts, as though words were deeds. No satirist could do justice to the sight of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and newly elected French President François Hollande shaking hands and vowing to work together to save the union and its currency. Insofar as this pair has any coherent ideas, they disagree. All they have in common is the precariousness of their position. Just trounced in local elections, Mrs. Merkel and her party are well on the way to joining the gathering crowd of electoral rejects. As for Hollande, he believes that growth comes from higher taxes and hundreds of thousands more state jobs, and all in arch-protectionist France. It can’t be long before such socialist illusion comes back to haunt that country.

Our satirist will also find it comic that the masters of Europe blame the Greeks while determined to ensure that the Greeks are rescued to carry on regardless. I cannot hold it against the Greeks. Entry into the EU was their opportunity as rather poor people to enrich themselves on other peoples’ money. Who would refuse such a gift? Of course they want to go on free-loading so pleasantly. It’s all part of the joke that they have voted for a politician called Alexis Tsipras, who in his well-honed Communist style believes that Greece should continue to pocket other peoples’ money. There’s consistency! But Greece came up with the wrong answer in its general election, and the masters of Europe may well make it vote and vote again until they have the right answer — though nobody can tell what that might be.

Ordinary people everywhere recognize reality, and now do not believe a thing they hear from the masters of Europe. The last world war and the Cold War survive in folk memory, and everyone is hunkering down for the hardships and injustices now brewing — defaults, conversions into new currencies, runs on banks, mass unemployment, everything that Mrs. Lagarde of the IMF in her elegant French salon way calls “messy.” Not forgetting violence. Fascist parties are rising once more. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party did well in the last Greek election and will do better in the next. The other side of it is the climbing suicide rate, especially among retired professional people who are defenseless as their pensions are cut.

In 1940, a book with the title “Guilty Men” became a historic marker by naming and shaming the democratic politicians whose ineptitude had allowed the Hitler catastrophe to unfold. What’s wanted now is an onslaught of just that kind to excoriate and drive out of the public arena the politicians whose fantasies about power, lack of insight into human nature, and refusal to acknowledge mistakes, have brought Europe to another perilous pass.

A few years ago a well-known historian told me that the European Union was a noble undertaking. I replied that surely he had lived long enough to know the dreadful ends to which noble enterprises have come within living memory. Yet he and those who think like him refuse to accept this reality. No matter what the cost, the determination of such people is what keeps the EU going. This is very like the determination that was all that kept the Soviet Union going in the dim and pointless era of Brezhnev when everyone could see that Communism was a busted flush.

The elections in France and Greece have thrown up Trotskyite and neo-Nazi parties. Such extremes pretend to be noble enterprises but are expressions of pure will, disconnected from reality, from anything that people actually want. Even François Hollande’s socialism is an act of pure will. His remedies of taxing and spending by centralized government have been proved time and again not to work. The European crisis, in other words, is opening the way to totalitarians who by definition cannot correct their mistakes and so must make the crisis worse. It’s the 1930s all over again, but fortunately for the time being without a Hitler on the horizon.

Should Israel Exist? is the title of a new and excellent book by Michael Curtis, professor emeritus at Rutgers and well-known as a political scientist. In a very measured way he reflects on the dominant fact concerning Israel, namely that, from the earliest proposal for such a state right up to the present, the Arabs have always refused to recognize that Israel has any right to exist; at intervals they go to war and would destroy it if they could. The United Nations, the European Union, the old Soviet Union, sometimes the American president, are among the various bodies and personalities that time and again intervene to take victory away from Israel and rescue Arabs from the consequences of their obsession. Geopolitics thus ensures that another war is bound to occur one day. Determination to defend itself, and success in doing so, is the cause of the international hostility Israel attracts.

In order to focus their hostility, the enemies of Israel ascribe to it all the sins today associated with abstract nouns like imperialism, colonialism and the like. This defies rational explanation, Professor Curtis writes, but it is serviceable. People with nothing to say about North Korea or Zimbabwe willingly dream of reducing Tel Aviv to the ruined level of Homs. In the past Jews were singled out and condemned for reasons now obviously malicious fictions. Today’s liberals and leftists are making common cause with Islamists who share falsehoods and fantasies with them.

Essentially rooted in superstition, this phenomenon keeps cropping up. Professor Moty Cristal is an Israeli expert on negotiation, and what has happened to him illustrates very clearly the racism now the proud prerogative of the Left. The British National Health Service had invited him to a workshop on “The Role of Negotiation in Dealing with Conflict.” The very man for it, you might think. But no. Unison is the trade union representing the NHS, and according to the media its members have requested the withdrawal of Cristal’s invitation,” as part of “a direct boycott of all Israeli people.” In 1933 the Nazis also declared a direct boycott of Jews, so without apparent self-consciousness or shame Unison is asking to be compared with stormtroopers.

Most of the million members of Unison, we may well suspect, will have no strong feelings about Israel and Palestine or Professor Cristal and his specialty. The insult to him is likely to be the work of a few surviving Stalinist or Trotskyite pit-ponies in a position to hijack some relevant committee in the moribund trade union.

The simultaneous death of Khalil Dale seems to offer another insight into the Islamo-leftist alliance. He was a British convert to Islam, had a long experience of do-gooding among Muslims, and was finally an aid worker in Pakistan. Islamists there took him hostage and then abandoned his decapitated corpse by a roadside. He has been the subject of a number of admiring articles, one of them in the London Times by Abdal Hakim Murad. Also a Muslim convert, he had been born in England as Tim Winters and now holds a lectureship in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University paid for by one of the Gulf rulers. He rejoices in the growing number of British people like him and Khalil Dale who have converted, especially women since 9/11, concluding, “We have found Islam to be a path to God.” Actually the unfortunate Khalil Dale found it to be a path to a grisly death. Michael Curtis argues that Jew-hatred has no rational explanation, but the subconscious sense that Islamists are unstoppable is widening. To be pleading for mercy is not enough; it’s too late for that, so it’s best to be on their side — and if that means sacrificing Israel and Jews, so be it.

Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. A year or two more, and she will have been on the throne longer than her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Her intention is to visit every county in Britain, and yesterday was the turn of Powys, in Wales. If you live here you had better get accustomed to rain. My father used to say, “I’m Welsh, I don’t get wet.” Yesterday the sky was extremely grey and low, and everyone got wet.

There are few grand houses hereabout, but one of them is Glanusk. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh flew in by helicopter at midday for lunch, and drove through the park afterwards in a motorcade. Perfunctory, you might say, merely fulfilling an obligation. I suppose you might also say that it was merely the occasion for a day off for the thousands of people present. Most of us in Powys are sheep farmers. Tents and marquees and stalls stretched around the park; children from almost 50 schools were taking part and singing; the brass band played; the flags flapped.

Since I am in the business of generalizing, I would say that most people here take life as they find it, with a sense that government is going to be against you, much like the weather. And here they all were soaked to the skin and slipping on mud underfoot, yet with expectation rising as the moment approached when the Queen would drive past. And there she was, in the back of a Rolls Royce driven at walking pace, dressed in turquoise blue, waving through the open window and looking half her age.

What can this lady mean to these cheering and excited people? Continuity, I suppose, though the country today is very different from what it was when she began her reign. Duty, perhaps responsibility, just being loyal to the things it is right and proper to be loyal to. Walter Laqueur is one of the most experienced and far-sighted political analysts of the day, and his new book After the Fall lays out how Europe has come to a dead end, with no way out of the inextricable mess its foolish leaders have got the continent into while the Queen has been getting on with public service these 50 years. In a judicious questioning tone which is particularly convincing, he unfolds why the nations of Europe have no further part to play in history. And yet the emotional energy of the crowd at the sight — really only a momentary glimpse — of the lady who is the national emblem made me wonder whether for once Walter Laqueur mightn’t be wrong, and in fact the world hasn’t heard the last of Britain.