Ignore Europe for one moment. In the kind of interdependent world in which we live – a key feature of which is population mobility and almost universal access to real-time communication – it is hardly surprising that people increasingly often think of themselves as having multiple identities. This is a subject which my friend and openDemocracy contributor, Paul Gillespie, has written about with eloquent and powerful conviction.

What I fear Roger Scruton from the right and Gisela Stuart from New Labour have in common is the illusion that the current crisis over the democratic legitimacy of the European Union and its institutions is something restricted to the EU. They may not be aware that all surveys of public opinion of this question reveal that citizens feel an equal loss of confidence in their national governments. Indeed in very many member-states the perceived crisis of legitimacy of the national state is greater than that affecting the EU institutions. This deep-seated malaise in nation-state politics may, among other things, be a product of the diminishing sense of serious political choice available at the national level to voters because of the constraints exercised by globalisation on the range of choices open to national politicians.

The irony is that the objective space to develop political choices at the European level is – at least within the areas of policy identified for EU decision-making – far greater. My impression is that there is a growing understanding of this among the emerging European political parties and a wide array of European civil-society organisations. Perhaps this experience of building a European transnational demos will be a valuable learning experience when we have to debate how to given greater democratic underpinning to the growing institutions of global governance.