History offers up another of its ironies. The Soviet Union collapsed when great masses of people simply walked away from it. You may recall the blissful faces of those crowds who strolled peacefully into West Berlin, and then proceeded to tear down the wall which had imprisoned them for two generations. Now the European Union is about to collapse because great masses of people are walking into it: very little ecstasy this time, just lawless desperation. But by sheer numbers, their progression is as inexorable and politically destabilising as that miraculous exodus which brought down the great Communist empire without a shot being fired.

Forget the pantomime “negotiations” this weekend over an emergency brake – which can’t be used without prior universal agreement (rather like a fire alarm that can’t be activated without an international committee being convened), or the tortuous new wording of empty promises. That isn’t even a sideshow. It is deliberately deceptive nonsense.

The only plausible explanation for this absurd displacement activity is that the Government now believes we must stay in a failing enterprise so that we can help to manage its closure. There may be something in this. Perhaps if the British are there to help shut down the shop, it will be done more sensibly and fairly. But as a political strategy this is dangerous and profoundly cynical. The country is about to be presented with a knowingly dishonest choice: it is not a question of leaving or remaining in a “reformed” EU.

The logic of the whole project – the Union as it has been, and still is, conceived – is unsustainable. Its contradictions and the consequences of its failure to live up to the grand unifying ideals of its founders, have now become so glaring that no one is even attempting to gloss them over. It is, of course, the great mass walk-in – the migration crisis – which has made this so inescapably clear. The EU was clearly incapable of coping in any rational and organised way with this phenomenon, even when its staggering growth had become entirely predictable.

If the principle of cooperative benevolence, which Europe designed in response to the terrible nationalist crimes of the last century, cannot deal with a humanitarian disaster at its doors, what on earth is it for? The EU’s calamitous inability to agree on anything has actually exacerbated the problem: the failure to establish regularised, systematic ways of coping with the influx has created total chaos in which a new form of international crime (people smuggling) has become entrenched in a way that will be almost impossible to root out.

The unilateral suspension of established rules on asylum by Germany, arguably the EU’s most politically powerful member, produced an avalanche of incomers with which poorer member states could not cope, thus creating a furious backlash against both the migrants and the EU authorities. In the vacuum left by EU institutions, the voluntary, charitable efforts to give aid and sustenance were outside of any properly administered control, so they inadvertently added to the problem by encouraging more migration.

Now there is an understandable demand for unaccompanied children to be given asylum and generous provision. But if it becomes known that unaccompanied children will be offered unconditional entry, or that they are the ticket to families gaining entry down the line, then there will be ever-growing numbers of children exposed to the terrifying danger of a journey alone. Then there is the plan to quarantine Greece and turn it into a hermetically-sealed refugee camp, because it was unable to process the thousands who managed to land on its scattered islands. Poor Greece. You might have thought it had suffered enough in the euro crisis.

The migrant problem should not have been insoluble. The numbers involved may have been daunting but, in truth, they were not unmanageable as a proportion of the whole EU population. Had the situation been addressed properly from the outset, and rigorous mechanisms put in place for assessment and re-settlement, this might have been a success story for Europe: the humane and fair-minded handling of a painful dilemma.

But it wasn’t – and the reasons for that go right to the heart of what will cause the EU to collapse. Each member state came to this with its own economic limitations, its own historical memory and its own political culture. When it came to confronting the sight of those endless marching columns of strangers, every country dealt with the experience in its own way – not as one small part of an Ever Closer Union, but as Hungarians or Poles only recently liberated from the Warsaw Pact, or as Danes or Swedes who took pride in their liberal traditions but were now feeling uncharacteristically alienated.

In the emergency created by migrant pressure, the EU simply became visibly what it should always have been understood to be: a confederation of different peoples whose varying experiences and attitudes cannot be homogenised. The governments of those differing nations have taken it in turns to be berated by EU officialdom: Hungary for its impromptu barbed-wire borders, the UK for taking too few refugees from Calais, and Denmark for its plan to confiscate valuables from refugees who will be receiving state support. Each one of those governments is, in fact, doing what its own electorate demands – which is exactly what democratically elected governments are supposed to do. Unless the EU abolishes democratic accountability altogether, this must continue to be so.

Even those national leaders who had apparently seized the moral high ground on migration were acting out of self-interest. Angela Merkel knows that Germany, with its ageing population, needs a mass injection of younger workers to sustain its economy. Her action made practical sense, even if it ended in a shambles.

Countries which have built successful economies by importing vast numbers of immigrants – as the US did historically – generally achieved this by rigorous management and selection. At the peak of America’s legal immigration programme at the turn of the last century, strict admission rules governed the intake. Immigrants had to show that they had hosts or contacts to receive them who would vouch for their immediate welfare, and that they were of sound mind and body so that they were not likely to become “a charge upon the state”. (When my family arrived at Ellis Island around 1905, one of the cousins whom I knew later as the elderly Aunt Rose, had measles. As a consequence, the whole family was detained in the hospital wing of the Ellis Island reception centre until she was deemed no longer contagious. There may have been an open invitation to the “huddled masses” of the world but they were not permitted to enter without scrutiny.)

If the EU had been united in its intentions, it might not have turned an emergency into a tragedy. Far from being a single unified entity, Europe is a disparate conglomeration of members who can just about manage to cooperate on issues of trade and logistics – providing that the necessary movements across national borders do not impinge on the more fundamental aspects of cultural identity and social cohesiveness. Mass migration has uncorked the ancient hatreds and suspicions which caused those borders to be embattled for generations but it is the pretext not the cause of Europe’s breakdown. It has simply exposed the anti-democratic bias and the administrative uselessness which was already there.

So now we have what Europeans never expected to see again on their own soil: shameful camps where people gain the impression that they have nothing to lose and so become prey to forms of criminality which should never have existed. Surely this crisis would have been handled better by individual countries, or ad hoc agreements between like-thinking leaders,