The Brussels fantasists should worry, now

About this.

Volkswagen is to suspend production at its Wolfsburg headquarters this month. BMW has cut output in Leipsig to one day a week and Porsche is shuttering its Stuttgart plant for a week. It is just as bad in France where PSA Peugeot Citroen is halting production for a month at Sochaux, the country's biggest industrial site.

The German people in particular, on both left and right, are becoming angry and restive as their economy collapses and Brussels forbids them the remedies they would apply if only they were, again, a sovereign nation in anything but name.

On the one hand:

The slump in Germany's core industry has led to vocal criticism of the Left-Right coalition government. The Handelsbatt newspaper warned this week that the coalition faces a "rebellion" unless it faces up to the gravity of the crisis.

On the other:

Germany's finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, is still refusing to back the European Union's €200bn (£170bn) fiscal package, calling it fatuous populism in a thinly veiled attack on Paris and London.

Mr Steinbrück joined colleagues from Sweden and France in rebuking the European Commission for prolonging the credit crisis with "bureaucratic" restrictions

Other European nations are variously ignoring EU rules as France always has or actively considering leaving the Euro as Italy has been doing for some time.

The abandonment by its few remaining supporters of any residual, sentimental loyalty to the idea of the European Union is becoming more likely by the day. The peoples of Europe, under very great stress, are beginning to realise that their pain is being made worse by supranational rules made in Brussels by unelected officials and then rammed through supine national parliaments by political elites. These rules are now working against the interests of the people of Europe.

No-one has been more supportive of the EU project than the Germans, from their windmills to their currency. However, when their country's core industries are shutting down, they will turn to an entity they recognise and resonate with: their nation. Germany.

The same will happen in France, as it always has though it is impolite - not communautaire - to say so out loud. France first. All else is convenience, nostalgic national bombast or smokescreen.

The nation is the most enduring and effective and natural political and communal entity. Anything bigger risks being (seen as) alien, even inimical.

As the sage Scruton has it:

The nation state provides us with the surest model for peace, prosperity, and the defence of human rights. In spite of this, the idea of the nation state is under attack, derided as a cause of conflict, and destined to be replaced by more 'enlightened' forms of jurisdiction. This is in spite of the fact that all recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind of transnational political order have ended up either as totalitarian dictatorships like the former Soviet Union or as unaccountable bureaucracies like the European Union.

Attempts to change the nature of the European Union in ways that wiII expropriate our sovereignty and annihilate the boundaries between jurisdictions have brought us to a turning point in our history.

I believe that we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world, and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it. Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe's Faust ring true for us: Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast, Erwirb es, urn es zu besitzen. (What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it.)

We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law. Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.

Forgetting our inheritance is a betrayal for which we may pay with our blood. Other have, in the history we are being taught so assiduously to despise and disregard.

Bureaucratic chains are no different from any other sort. Angry people will always throw them off if their lives and their nations require it.