Where to now for Europe and the EU?

The same might be said of much of the top political class within the EU's member states. Indeed, the UK's Brexit vote has been interpreted here as partly a ballot against elitism in national politics, on both sides of the ideological divide.

I wrote last week about the new brand of leadership the UK needs if it is to flourish going forward. How the UK finds its way out of its present political morass is anyone's guess, but I have no doubt that it eventually will. Britain has too long a history of stable democracy to wind up with long-term instability.

The mainly English and Welsh regions which voted for Brexit have struggled to make their voices heard on national and European issues because they are a long way from the Westminster circle.

With or without their own national referenda, the best possible outcome of the Brexit vote for other EU members may be a radical rethink on the continent's future and the possible emergence of a new type of pan-European union.

Eurosceptic feelings in other regions will only intensify if EU institutions are seen to simply dig in their collective heels, carrying on much as before.

If they appear to believe that they have nothing to learn from the departure of the EU's second biggest financial contributor, and the world's fifth largest economy – the EU's capacity to look down its collective nose will be interpreted, rightly, as myopia.

Were it to emerge, this new European entity might function mainly as a trading bloc, as was the case in the earliest forms of the EEC. It would need to recognise the primacy of nation-states in such matters as political and legal sovereignty and setting limits on normal migration. Shared sovereignty would continue to exist at some level, but in a much more tightly constrained EU.

It might at the same time provide a vital platform for willing collaboration on pressing regional and global problems such as mass migration crises and climate change. On security, it would support and strengthen the existing alliances between national agencies, but all talk of establishing a European army or security force would be scrapped.

In short, this new entity would need to see itself as a servant of nation states, rather than their master. Yes, there is often a fine line between making treaties robust enough to be meaningful and so strong that they cease to be treaties and become supranational entities in and of themselves.

However, Europe must learn that its greatest strength is unity with diversity - not a false uniformity forced on it from above.

The Euro crisis revealed long ignored but deeply rooted north-south cultural differences on issues like taxation, debt reduction, nepotism and retirement. The EU, in its haste to push through an agenda of eventual federalisation, established a common currency which only ever papered over these cultural cracks.

Even now, some former advocates of the Euro question its future stability as a currency, because of those still unaddressed cultural gaps.

Whether Britain would apply to be part of such a new entity – whether it would even be invited – remains to be seen.

However, I daresay that only a very small minority of the Brits who cast a vote on June 23 were casting a vote for or against Europe itself. They were voting on how they saw their future within the currently constituted European Union.

I think the past has shown and the future will further reveal that, outside of a small band of dyed-in-the-wool cultural isolationists – who exist in every nation – Britain remains friendly to Europe. The current EU, as the Brexit vote shows, is another matter entirely.