“What is left of the European idea?” the UK-based American journalist Janet Daley asks rhetorically, in an article she wrote for The Telegraph in the aftermath of the tragic attacks in Paris.

The author then analyzes what developments in the EU preceded the attacks, as well as the disastrous consequences of this sequence of events.

“The disastrously uncoordinated response to the refugee crisis had already discredited the notion that this was a unified federation in which all member states had an equal voice,” Daley writes.

The shambles that was the migrant crisis was predictably exploited by terrorists, she explains, noting that the terrorists knew only too well that “once you set foot on the holy ground of Europe, you may as well be invisible.”

“The failures of intelligence – about which European security agencies are now so exercised – may have been egregious but they were also inevitable. How can you track suspected terrorists across a continent which has not only dismantled boundaries but deconstructed the apparatus which allows nation states to monitor transit across their territory?” she questions.

And then the author elaborated on the ultimate result of the EU’s border-free aspirations.

“It is not only the free movement of peoples and goods (which turned out to include Kalashnikovs) which has come into question,” she writes.

“Along with the right to ‘tighten’ France’s borders, whatever that turns out to mean in practice, François Hollande also demanded – and got – permission to ignore EU budget limits so that he could increase government spending on security and defense.”

Such developments, in turn, lead to more uncomforting conclusions:

“If national borders may be reinstated by individual governments either with hasty barbed wire or officially reconstituted checkpoints, and EU budget rules can be thrown out whenever circumstances require, what does the authority of the EU Commission and Council and Parliament amount to?” she questions.

She then offers a possible answer:

“A largely useless, self-perpetuating, massively overpaid bureaucracy presiding over Potemkin institutions whose deliberations count for nothing when the lives of real people living under real governments are at stake.”

The author furthermore draws another conclusion, that the institutions of the EU are not fit for the purpose of uniting several nations under one roof, as they simply can’t “put aside their own interests and the concerns of their own populations for the sake of a Europe-wide policy”.

She concludes by saying that this proves “the European conception of democracy is a sham.”