You couldn't make it up.
News that the European Union has won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning comes as we learn that Europe's attempt to break the power of nation states through currency union has pushed Greek unemployment to a record 25.1pc – just ahead of Spain – with far worse yet to come.
It comes as EMU's North-South split turns more acrimonious by the day, with the creditor bloc and debtor bloc (to use a very crude description that does not capture what is really a story of currency misalignment) eyeing each other with increasing hatred.
It comes days after Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted in Athens by enraged crowds, some giving Hitler salutes, others protesting that Greece has become a "slave colony of the European Union".
The Greek state had to deploy 7,000 police and impose a partial lockdown of Athens to keep her safe. The Frankfurter Allgemeine said Konrad Adenauer enjoyed a friendlier welcome in 1954 – as he deserved – less than a decade after Wehrmacht occupation (and 300,000 deaths).
It comes as the vice-president of the Spanish parliament calls for deployment of the Guardia Civil to crush Catalan separatists. And while the Catalan dispute obviously predates the EMU crisis, it has erupted now precisely because the EMU system has driven Spain into crippling depression.
It comes after the EMU's policy structure – having first stoked credit booms in a string of countries – has swung to the other extreme of maniacal contraction that is pushing the eurozone into a deepening double-dip slump.
Precisely because the victim states have surrendered their key policy levers to the EU Project, they have no means of defending themselves or answering the cries of their people. Hence the warnings this week from Portugal's former President Jorge Sampaio that the economic asphyxiation of his country threatens to destroy its fledgling democracy.
The Nobel Prize comes, in short, as events have shown that the Hegelian push for breakneck integration – the supranational assault on the ancient nation states of Europe – has proved to be an unmitigated disaster.
The disaster has occurred because ideological extremists have tried to rush history, and because the likes of the Nobel Committee and their counterparts in EU capitals believe the European Project to be a higher ideal, and pan-European institutions to be more exalted.
They have the matter backwards. The Project is incrementally violating the Burkean Principle that most Telegraph readers would subscribe to: the tried and tested, the small platoon, the ancestral cords of memory, and customs and loyalties that bind a people.
Sadly, those willing to defend the democratic nation state as the higher ideal have been too few, and too cowed by fashion. The Hegelians have run away with the argument, and the results are now plain before our eyes.
Yes, we can all agree that the EU's Franco-German machinery today beats Verdun, but it was not the democratic nation state that caused Verdun. It was a long-premeditated attack by a military autocracy, as Fritz Fischer makes very clear in Griff nach der Weltmacht.
Nor was it the democratic nation state that caused the invasion of Prague and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and all that was too follow.
This veiled attempt to blame the wars of the 20th century on Europe's feuding states is a sleight of hand, too easily allowed to pass. There was no full continental war for a century after the Congress of Vienna. What changed this in 1914 was very specific.
The EU's high priests draw on a caricature version of history that must be challenged. The post-war national democracies – nurtured by the Marshall Plan, Nato, and benign American influence, nota bene – are not the problem, they are the solution. They have been the foundation of Europe's peaceful order for 60 years, even if some are not yet fully anchored and secured.
Yes, you can argue that the prospect of EU accession helped Greece, Spain, and Portugal move to democracy, with eastern Europe following. But it is a specious argument. Most of Latin America has evolved towards democracy over the same period, and large parts of Africa and Asia too. It is a global shift.
The central threat to this once happy state of affairs in Europe comes from EU aggrandisement itself as it builds structures beyond parliamentary control. We will find out soon enough whether Euroland really will cross the Rubicon to fiscal union to stop the euro breaking apart, and in doing so usurp the tax and spending powers of these parliaments altogether, that is to say whether EMU leaders are really willing to rip the heart out of democracy.
The Nobel committee likes to deploy prizes to push its agenda and encourage what it believes to benign behaviour. In this case the purpose is to press North Europe to stand full square behind the Project.
"We want to focus on what has been achieved in Europe in terms of peace and reconciliation," says the Committee's Thorbjørn Jagland. "It is a message to Europe to secure what they have achieved and not let the continent go into disintegration again because it means the emergence of extremism and nationalism."
We should not doubt his good intentions. We may however, abominate his judgment.