Will the EU break up? What would that mean for an independent Scotland?

There are serious grounds for considering that the EU is in systemic crisis. The European community has already started breaking up with the departure of the UK. Brexit has legitimised the unthinkable – that member states can quit. True, the UK has now joined the new European Political Community, an intergovernmental forum first proposed by France’s President Macron. The EPC represents 44 European states including all the EU members and candidate members plus Britain, Turkey and Ukraine.

The very fact that France is promoting a new European political architecture outside the EU – and that post-Brexit Britain is a willing member – is proof that there is life after Brussels. And once you admit that logic, then you have a post-EU world.

In this context, it is very significant that the new EPC includes Recep Erdogan’s (above) Turkey, which the EU has kept at arm’s length as a candidate since 1987. Europe needs Turkey as a bulwark against (and perhaps an interlocuter with) the Kremlin. The European polity is already a more complex space.

In one sense, this new flexibility helps the Scottish case. Dunderheads prattle on about an indy Scotland being excluded from Europe, for this or that spurious reason. These imbeciles totally fail to understand the complex evolution of the EU and the likelihood that European politics in the future will be multipolar and multitrack. Which opens not just room for the economic integration of an independent Scotland but of that new nation being more influential politically in its own right than as an appendage to London.

But the road ahead for Europe is going to be bumpy. One reason is that the triumvirate of leading national actors in the European saga – France, Germany and (peripatetically) Italy – are all going their own way.

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All three countries now face internal ructions that are diverting them from playing their traditional role in leading and shaping Europe politically. And a leaderless Europe is at the mercy of global economic and geopolitical threats.

Start with Germany, whose successful economic model has just been blown to smithereens. Gone is cheap energy from Russia. Gone is Germany’s guaranteed market in China. Gone is Germany’s technological prowess.

At the same time, Germany is being forced by events in Ukraine to rethink its entire military posture. Chancellor Scholz has ordered an extra €100 billion of defence spending, covering new jet fighters, a new battle tank and a new air defence system.

This is a resurgent Germany that needs to reconquer European markets and exert itself politically and militarily. A Germany that has just unilaterally binned EU fiscal rules in order to subsidise local consumers against rising energy bills.

This new Germany will no longer hide behind the EU institutions or channel its political interests via the project for greater European integration. Welcome to a German Europe. Which, of course, isolates France.

Since the time of General de Gaulle, French diplomacy was built on making the EU a counterweight to America and Russia, by combining French leadership and German economic muscle. But Germany is no longer playing ball and instead is pursuing is own national interests.

Macron’s (above) attempt to revive the project for European integration has crashed in flames. Domestically, though he won a second term in the Elysee, he has lost his majority in the French parliament to avowed Eurosceptics on his right and left. Macron is a lame duck with little room for manoeuvre.

Then there is wayward Italy. It is more than 30 years since Italy dreamed of overtaking Britain economically, the so-called “sorpasso”. The Italian economy has stalled since the 2008 banking crisis and remains the sick man of Europe.

In the ensuing political chaos, Italians have just elected their first far-right leader since they hung Mussolini – Giorgia Meloni. The British media extols Meloni’s new-found “moderation” but listen to her speeches and all the old fascist tropes are there (“international conspiracy of bankers”).

She is a classic denigrator of the EU project and, like Marine Le Pen in France, has only tempered her criticisms in order to win elections.

Meloni’s victory also saw the exit of Mario Draghi as Italian prime minister. A former head of the European Central Bank, Draghi was the number one Europhile and technocrat in Italy, and a leading proponent of European integration.

His political defenestration has gone unnoticed in post-Brexit Britain but it represents the passing of an era in Italy and in Europe. It also suggests that the Central Bank and European Commission will be unable to force through a common strategy to deal with the rampant inflation now wreaking havoc with the EU’s economy.

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Eurozone inflation is up at 10.7% and the euro has plunged to parity with the dollar. But EU member states are all pursuing individual anti-inflation strategies – hardly “communautaire”. In Italy, prices are rising at 12% per annum. As a result, Italian government borrowing costs are rocketing causing a downgrading of its banking system from “stable” to “negative”.

Germany is beset by wage strikes. Only France has escaped inflation damage so far because its nuclear energy sector is state-owned, and President Macron has imposed a 4% price cap on electricity. However, that ends in December.

The one area of economic unity in the bloc has been in promoting a massive shift from Russian gas to liquid natural gas imported from America. Alas, making LNG adds massively to global greenhouse emissions, negating Europe’s supposed net-zero policy.

Other areas of energy policy in the EU are engulfed in internecine warfare between member states and the Commission. Berlin is trying to stymie Commission proposals on hydrogen production in order to favour German firms. And Poland is resisting Commission interference with its plans to build an American nuclear plant.

Meanwhile, the Russo-Ukraine war is adding to the centrifugal forces undermining the EU project. Semi-authoritarian Hungary – which has long had ethnic and border disputes with Ukraine – is refusing to send military aid to Kiev. Romanian farmers are being bankrupted by imports of cheap Ukrainian grain.

At the same time, the Baltic and Nordic states are urging both the EU and the UK to extend the military build-up against the Kremlin.

Adding Ukraine and Georgia to the EU – as envisaged by Germany’s Chancellor Scholz – will only add to these tensions. It will also annoy Russia. Scholz also wants to remove the current rules requiring unanimity of all EU members when making major decisions.

A 36-nation EU would be a nightmare when it comes to decision-making. But removing the veto will be opposed by the smaller members. We might ask the First Minister where she stands on this?

My take on the situation is that the EU will become looser rather than more federal. And that policy differences between member states will limit any expansion of common decision-making.

This will be a fragmented Europe perhaps dissolving into internal blocs. It is time Scotland took off the rose-tinted spectacles and looked hard at where Europe is going.