Over the last year, AT has highlighted the transparently anti-democratic, oligarchic nature of the European Project.

Now, that lack of democratic legitimacy is on display for all to see.

The European Union, the European Parliament, the Brussels bureaucracy and  the Euro currency do not rely on the consent of the governed for their legitimacy and efficacy. Rather, they rely on the will of the transnational European elite to sustain them in the face of popular opposition. Because the Euro and the EU itself largely exist in defiance of the will of the European electorate, the result is a profound illegitimacy in Europe's governing institutions.

This illegitimacy is being reflected in popular and sometimes violent street demonstrations and in the steady rise of nationalist and neo-fascist political parties.  Switzerland's recent election was only the latest evidence of this.  Coupled with popular alarm over native population declines, the ebbing of Christian Europe and creeping Islamization as a result of Muslim immigration into the EU, the next year's round of national elections promises to be an important bellwether for the future of Europe.

The UK never joined the Eurozone. Yet, the disease of the European ruling class has taken hold there as well.  Last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron faced down a rebellion by his own Conservative back-benchers demanding that the UK's ambivalent involvement in the EU be put to a popular referendum.  The Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition prevailed in Parliament.

For now, the British people have once again been denied the opportunity to express their will.

Yet the stark fact is that the extraordinarily high levels of unemployment and a massive sovereign debt crisis across the EU (especially in Ireland and Southern Europe)  threaten a real possibility of total societal collapse in certain EU countries. Faced with this reality, what has been the EU elite's response to the popular outrage?

More of the same.  And a refusal to let the people vote or let their elected representatives control

their nation's own financial and fiscal affairs.

Janet Daley of London's Sunday Telegraph explains it all to you in her important, front-page column today. Her title: "This Was the Week That European Democracy Died."  She gives the Germans all the worst of it, too.

Stay tuned. This ain't over.