Or is it Coup des États?

Definitely one or the other. Let's stick with the headline one.

My latest Commentator piece is out, belabouring a theme familiar to regular readers here, namely the Limits of Trust:

Once upon a time world leaders met only rarely if at all. They maintained their dignity if not power precisely by not meeting.

Now EU leaders are meeting and talking almost every month in one way or the other. This (for now) has the effect of making wars in Europe a lot less likely. How can Hans send his country to war against Juan and Maria’s countries when they had such a jolly expensive dinner together last week in Brussels?

There is nonetheless a downside. Which is that Trust reasserts itself in a peculiarly personal way. Private tiffs can spill over into public disagreements, and vice versa.

Imagine that you are the Dumpling Finance Minister who is getting it in the neck from the Dumpling media and public opinion for being far too lenient with the EU’s Olive tendency. You sit there at the EU Council meeting listening to an Olive drone on about urgent reforms which both of you know won’t be carried out quickly or honestly or even at all. Worse, the predecessor of this Olive (probably a cousin of the current one) actually lied at Council meetings time and again about the state of his country’s finances – that’s how the whole mess started.

Basically, your willingness to listen to any more Olive nonsense is trending towards absolute zero. Your exasperation is likely to burst out when it is your turn to speak. Meanwhile your unctuous officials sense your mood and are freezing out their Olive counterparts in the coffee breaks.

And lo! ‘Dialogue’ diminishes. Trust declines. Emails start to get no replies, phone-calls aren’t taken. Differences start to count for more than what people have in common. Those who have money start to bark out instructions to those who are hoping for yet more cheap loans. The whole mood shifts for the worse, defaulting to petulant defensiveness...

The problem for the European Union is that it has very little legal or political room for manoeuvre for tackling the Eurozone crisis. It's as if they designed a beautiful tall building without factoring in the right sort of fire safety plumbing. There is no direct way to put out all the small fires which have erupted on different floors of the building, and as these fires develop they in turn reduce still further the room for bringing in more water.

Thus:

... the mighty elite brains who got us into this mess will come up with an even better plan, but then implement it with even less public scrutiny and direct accountability than now exists. To do that they may have to start taking serious legal short-cuts, to the point of side-stepping or ignoring key national laws and EU treaty constraints.

A voter's right to choose.

This is not good enough. Insofar as it means anything it sounds like a coup d’etat, or more precisely coup d’etats.

I might be prepared to sign away some of my own autonomy and my own little slice of my country’s autonomy in return for a wider economic package which makes sense, but only if I get to take part in a proper debate about the options. Which, given what is at stake in current circumstances, means a referendum

Imposed behind my back on the hoof by the people who led us into this fiasco? No way. That breaks the most profound Trust test which allows our society to work freely

Maybe we are heading towards an existential democratic crisis. Stressed-out European leaders round on their bewildered and increasingly angry voters, and tell them in blunt terms: “Your money. Or your democratic life”.