If the EU tries to stop its constituent economies going global, I surmise from working trips to Milan and Amsterdam that it is terrible at it. These cities gleam with graphic evidence that Brussels is not the dead hand of Eurosceptic lore. It is either an enabler of mercantile openness or, at worst, an irrelevance.
With all rich regions, the complicated relationship is (or should be) with their own countries. It is the nation state that taxes their output and sends the receipts to other areas. It is the nation state that can act against their interests through sheer weight of electoral numbers. Ask Londoners. Next to this, the EU, for all its supranational pretensions, asks nothing of them.
So why are there not more Catalonias? Or more Venetos and Lombardys, the two Italian regions that voted for more autonomy on Sunday? And might there be in future? Catalans have a stronger ethnic identity than most regional populations but the other raw materials of separatist feeling, which seem to include economic self-reliance and historic experience of self-rule, are there in city-regions across Europe and beyond.