I’m radically pro-European. You should like your neighbours, ideally, and I do. Consider every country in Europe in turn and you should be able to access a wide range of positives, politically and culturally, about each. Sure, some may be stereotypes, but this is an extraordinary and diverse continent to be part of. I also feel more European than British, frankly: happier spending time in Greece or Holland or Croatia than in much of England.

But does being pro-European in that sense mean you necessarily have to support EU membership no matter what? The crisis over the single currency is part of a broader crisis around the structures of the EU, including the regularly-described “democratic deficit”. The expansion of the directly democratic element of EU politics has come in baby steps, with the European Parliament’s greater but still inadequate powers being handed over begrudgingly by the Commission and by member state Ministers on the Council.

The weak argument is also still made that those Ministers represent a democratic element, despite a complete absence of public accountability for their decisions as Europe’s second chamber. In this country, at least, the European Parliament’s day-to-day decisions are almost always ignored by the media and the public, partly because no serious effort is made to explain them or even produce a clear website. The best-known MEPs are typically those from parties not at Westminster: Nigel Farage and Caroline Lucas (prior to her 2010 win in Brighton Pavilion).

Overall, it’s hard to avoid the idea that the European Union is a quintessentially elite project, at best a vehicle made by those elites as a representation of profoundly pro-European but relatively vague attitudes that have been a majority across much of the continent since the Second World War. There have been no protests against the nation-state as previously constituted, though, no substantial ginger groups distributing petitions for more integration – “what do we want? a reduction in qualified majority voting! when do we want it? before the Lisbon Treaty comes into force!”

Despite that, there is much the European Union has been responsible for that I admire, typically exactly the sort of thing that makes Farage go red in the face. Environmental regulations, the “social chapter” and limits on the working week (which the UK should have signed up to), free movement of citizens and their right to work across the Union, consumer protection legislation, all that good stuff. If it weren’t for the very obvious price to pay, it’d be great not to have to change money while travelling across the continent.

The flip side is substantial, though. What if we wanted to renationalise the railways? EU rules require at least an accounting separation of rail infrastructure and train services, a substantial part of the problem, and this is enforced by an aggressively pro-competition Commission. Same with postal services – it’s possible that it would prove hard even for an independent Scotland to undo the three-party consensus Royal Mail privatisation within the EU.

In fact, if you could sum up the politics of the pre-crisis European establishment in one word, it would be “competition”: it’s perhaps more central to the Union’s operation than it was to Thatcherism itself. There is no ill the Commission doesn’t think can be fixed by more market liberalisation, and no institution too important to jeopardise with this ideological drive.

But all of that is being eclipsed by the single currency debacle. The mainstream left, right and centre all backed this project (less of the right, admittedly), but not the Scottish Greens – although I have to admit my concern about stability was based on the effect of a single interest rate on divergent economies, not about the combination of deregulated banking sectors combined with divergent fiscal policies and bond rates.

And the fact remains that the EU establishment’s response to the Eurozone crisis has been threefold: dither, slosh public money into banks rather than bailing out innocent depositors (where the right’s concerns about moral hazard are also valid), and impose massively regressive anti-cyclical cuts on the public sector. We also have to watch the unpleasant spectacle of Germany in particular benefitting from the Euro’s low value (as far as German exporters are concerned), at the direct expense of the poorer nations for whom the single currency remains an over-valued albatross.

The solutions being touted to this failure to integrate is, as always, further integration. The much-written about Eurobonds would mean the richer nations, not just Germany, would cover the loans to the broken banks while also effectively setting fiscal policy throughout the EU. There would be virtually no point Syriza winning the Greek elections on Sunday: much of their agenda to protect workers’ rights would be subject to an Angela Merkel veto.

Just last night it transpired that Commission President Barroso is proposing a union of banks to go with the bankers’ union we already see in effect: a more efficient way to fleece the public on behalf of the markets than European Union policy has perhaps never been devised. Like many of the Eurozone sticking-plasters, this will have a substantial impact on the non-Eurozone members of the EU too.

And can this deeper and closer political union, a union with internal financial transfers and two speeds in the same direction, even be delivered before the Euro collapses under the weight of its own inherent contradictions? Will public opinion across the EU permit it?

For now, most of the organised party-political scepticism about the project is on the right: not just the Blimpish UKIP but also harder right elements in European politics like Wilders’s PVV. The reasons for centre-left support for the project vary from member state to member state, but are often rooted in a laudable desire for international solidarity.

For the Labour party, specifically, and the parts of the UK-wide left which still believed in Labour during the 1980s, there’s also an emotional link: Jacques Delors was an effective opposition to the Thatcher administration in just the way Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot weren’t. But that’s no basis to determine our position in international structures, especially given the market fundamentalism set out above. EU membership does come with a limit to how right-wing your government can be, but it’s pretty slack: neither savage austerity nor such abominations as the recent Hungarian media legislation seem to be offside.

The point is that membership also limits how left you can be, especially economically. It’s explicitly a market project, not a popular project, and where I’d expect to agree with the smarter part of the Tory right (Douglas Carswell, Dan Hannan etc) is that it should be up to the voting public to determine where national policy lies on that spectrum. The alternative is to accept a distant backstop in the direction you don’t want to see the country go, the price being a limit to the ambition with which you can head in the other direction.

Greens in this country have spent long enough saying “yes, but reform” to the EU. Is it time to take that to “no, unless”, at the very least? Should we really abandon healthy scepticism about this floundering project to the right? It may well be time to look at the alternatives, and to start setting out how more independent nation-states might cooperate on labour and environmental standards, as well as working together in other ways that could preserve the EU’s wins for the people but stop putting the thumb on the scale for deregulated speculative capitalism.