YESIndeed it could, but not in the way you think. Nations will not turn their backs on the European Union in search of lost national spirit. Quite the contrary. They will turn to the institutions in Brussels with increasingly taxing demands, and that is something the system was not built for. The EU was not designed to take hard decisions between competing interests. It is very bad at making choices. What it does well is to govern by rule, and the more impersonal and automatic the rules, the better.
But suppose that the present difficulties are only the beginning. Deep interconnection between different systems leads one crisis to cascade into the next. Start with debt in the south. Italian debt is expected to surge above 160 per cent of GDP, with France and Spain also at risk. These countries are bound to demand the creation of new EU-wide financing mechanisms; they will be refused because that would fundamentally change the union. At the same time, countries such as Germany will ask for new rules on monetary policy to lock in new safeguards- the recent ruling of its constitutional court against the European Central Bank showed this is an increasingly fraught issue. But again, these requests will be refused because they would undermine the European project.