Many of us feel about the future of the European Union like the mythical Irishman who was asked for directions. Like him we’d say: ‘I wouldn’t start from here in the first place.’ But if the Irishman made that comment in today’s Europe, he would be told to go away and not come back until he had changed his mind.

Last week Jean-Claude Juncker, the present holder of the EU presidency, said in a comment which would be pure black comedy if it were not so alarming, that France and the Netherlands should rerun their referendums to obtain the “right” answer if they reject Europe’s constitutional treaty: “The countries that have said no will have to ask themselves the question again.” Such is the mentality at the heart of the EU establishment; such is its artless view of democracy.

Millions of Europeans, new and old, clearly feel that we have arrived in very much the wrong place as far as the ideal of European co-operation goes. But the hysteria about the referendums offers, suddenly, a historic chance to start again and to go in a different direction and rather more slowly. It has become clear that Europe has reached a moment of crisis which — unless it is squandered — could offer a truly inspiring chance of radical rethought and reform.

Perhaps one should not be too optimistic. Since 1985 there have been four big European treaty negotiations, three of them about institutional change. And as Sir Stephen Wall, a former ambassador to the EU and adviser to Tony Blair, said last week: “To an extent all of them have been a proxy for the one negotiation the union has not had: how to define its modern vision, purpose and relevance.”

What is the EU for? That is the simple question which underlies the whole project but is rarely asked and rarely answered. It doesn’t suggest that European union is pointless. It doesn’t suggest that European co-operation is not worth having. It is genuine and deserves a good answer. But if you ask Europhiles what the European project is for, they will respond with incredulity and perhaps even mild contempt. The answer, they feel, should be self-evident to a civilised person.

British Europhiles tend to be evasive because they know that the real grand projet is unacceptable here. The only straight answer I have had from a Europhile was from an Italian, who said disarmingly that his country’s governments were so terrible that anything would be better, especially if there were large sums of public money knocking around.

Is the EU to prevent Europeans massacring each other? That certainly was a central purpose of the founding fathers of the project. Nation states had produced the carnage of two world wars. Nationalism must therefore be checked and subsumed under a greater, wiser, supranational state aiming at ever greater unity. Some people even claim that it has worked. They argue that European unity has kept the peace since the war.

None of that convinces. The post-war peace in greater Europe was kept by the United States. Nationalism may have its risks, but so do superstates, and there are plenty of ways of keeping the peace by other means.

Greater Europe could have a powerful military and diplomatic alliance, rather like Nato, without automatically ceding national sovereignty. This sort of co-operation does not necessarily entail ever closer political integration. Indeed, it would probably work better without — countries would be free to opt out on occasion, as the French opted out of Nato without disastrous effects.

As for keeping alive the European memories of our terrible past, there is little likelihood that we in Britain will forget. Countless films, plays, novels and television programmes revisit the bloodshed and the totalitarianism. It is, quite rightly, impossible to be ignorant of it. If schoolchildren here learn little else, they all have a few lessons on Nazism and the Holocaust.

Equally important to peace are the many personal ties that Europeans have been making with each other since the war — through trade, travel, co-operation between musicians, students, artists, scientists, charities, galleries etc — none of which needs an organisation to make it happen.

Is the EU meant to stand united as a superpower, as a counterbalance to the United States and later to China? That certainly has been uppermost in the minds of the French and one could argue that more international balance would be better.

The problem is that greater Europe is not at all united in this sense, at least for now. It is impossible, for example, to imagine how a Europe united under the control of a single foreign minister — as proposed in the constitutional treaty — could possibly have dealt with the US invasion of Iraq. For senior Eurocrats to try to force Europe into a superpower unity that it does not yet feel, by undemocratic methods, will make more division only more likely.