For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders to its vassals, into an organisation based on broad consensus between elected governments, it is likely to find itself side-lined or even facing a continental schism.