Yet admirers still speak of Germany as Europe’s last lion, the only leader with the vision and capacity to save the E.U. There is much that is admirable about German action in the world, but as things now stand they are likelier to be remembered as the E.U.’s unwitting destroyer. The longer they remain the only loud voice in the EU, the more the forces of reaction and Xenophobia will gain strength.

There is still time for the E.U. to be saved. Europe needs a real security policy, backed by credible military power and less dependence on Russian energy and German political will, which has been severly lacking when it come to anything to do with Russia. It needs to regulate migration strictly outside its borders so that it can remain open within them. It needs robust economic growth and much lower rates of unemployment but above all it needs institutions in Brussels that aren’t mere regulatory busybodies trying to punish member states for being economically competitive.

What’s the alternative? A passage from Norman Davies’s magisterial history of Europe suggests the darker possibilities:

“Inter-war politics were dominated by the recurrent spectacle of democracies falling prey to dictatorship.” He continued: “It cannot be attributed to any simple cause, save the inability of Western Powers to defend the regimes which they had inspired. The dictators came in all shapes and sizes — communists, fascists, radicals and reactionaries, left-wing authoritarians (like Pilsudski), right-wing militarists (like Franco), monarchs, anti-monarchists, even a cleric like Father Tiso in Slovakia. The only thing they shared was the conviction that Western democracy was not for them.”

Are we seeing that slip into despotism today? Germany's warlike stance, their willingness to go to war and the revitalise militarism we see throughout their nation suggests yes. Whilst no other state in the world stepped up its military in the way Germany did through the Armenian Crisis, the way in which the population of Germany willingly accepted, even embraced, their governments desire to turn their whole economy into an instrument of total war should scare any and all supporters of the democratic system in Europe and beyond, the most frightening thing is the way the German population fell into line. The question has to be asked, did the leopard ever change its spots, or has Prussian militarism always resided in the soul of Germany, waiting for the excuse to burst forth?

The stakes are too high for Germany to keep muddling around the world in its cameo as leader of the free world, all the wile ignoring the home front slipping back into the stereotypical authoritarian, militarist stereotype of Germans that feels more and more justified as time goes on.

Not only that, the stakes are too high for other European nations to simply sit back and accept German hegemony in the EU, lest they find themselves once more under a German Jackboot.