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The times are so alarming that sometimes all you can do is laugh. Consider Fortis, the large Belgian-Dutch bank and insurance company, which this week became Europe’s biggest casualty so far of the world financial turmoil.

Only a few months ago it launched a new advertising campaign.  It was a nice catchy slogan, too. ”Here today. Where tomorrow?”

Where indeed? As self-fulfilling prophecies go, this was right up there with the Oedipus legend.

Yet the slogan also brings to mind what many Belgians and other people see as the grievous condition of Belgium itself. The Belgian state is here today, as it has been for the past 177 years, but where will it be tomorrow?

The gulf between the prosperous, Dutch-speaking northern region of Flanders and the less prosperous, French-speaking southern region of Wallonia is so wide that, apart from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belgium must be classified these days as Europe’s most internally divided country.

Belgium has been in almost total political paralysis since a general election in June 2007, with Flemish and Walloon parties unable to agree a deal on more autonomy for the regions. Only a week before Fortis was bailed out, Prime Minister Yves Leterme’s government was brought to its knees when a Flemish nationalist party withdrew its support.

Yet this is by no means the whole story. Perhaps the most important lesson from the Fortis drama is that, when the chips were down, the Belgian government and Belgian regulators were able to co-ordinate a rapid emergency intervention to save the company.

It wasn’t other banks or the private sector that rescued Fortis. It wasn’t Flanders and it wasn’t Wallonia. It was, together with the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the much-maligned Belgian state. Two days later, the Belgian state helped shore up the finances of Dexia, the Franco-Belgian financial services group.

No wonder Leterme was confident enough to appear on Belgian TV on Tuesday evening and say pointedly that, “as a new shareholder” in Fortis, the Belgian government would not be happy if the bank awarded a €4m-5m payoff to Herman Verwilst, the former chief executive.

So, three cheers for Belgium - and a loud raspberry for the people who dreamed up Fortis’s advertising campaign!

How many lessons do European Union policymakers need before they rid themselves of the illusion that Europe’s economy and financial system are to a considerable extent “decoupled” from those of the US?

In six EU countries - the Benelux trio, Denmark, Germany and the UK - we have seen emergency state intervention over the past few days to rescue or nationalise collapsing banks and mortgage lenders. In each case, the action would not have been necessary had it not been for the financial upheavals in the US.

Yet for most of September, EU finance ministers and other high-ranking officials were at pains to assure us that Europe would be only mildly exposed to any financial contagion emanating from the US.

It wasn’t true then, and it certainly isn’t true now. According to the International monetary Fund, European banks’ aggregate exposure to US subprime mortgages is roughly 73 per cent of the exposure of US banks. Moreover many European banks have become highly leveraged in recent years, leaving themselves with few escape routes when credit conditions tighten and they face unexpected losses and writedowns.

But this is not the first example of European complacency. Last January and February, EU policymakers - such as Jean-Claude Juncker,  head of the eurozone’s finance ministers’ group, and Joaquín Almunia, the EU monetary affairs commissioner - loftily dismissed suggestions that Europe’s economy might fall into serious trouble as a result of the US downturn. Europe was more self-sufficient, pursued better balanced policies and was more resilient, was the message.

Less than a year later, the major European economies - France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK - are all either in recession or on the brink. Between April and June, the eurozone suffered its first quarter-on-quarter contraction of GDP since the euro’s launch in 1999.

One can sympathise with the yearning of European policymakers to be “decoupled” from the US, in an economic sense. They see it as an affirmation of independence and the basis for a firmer European identity in the future. Some policymakers even seem to speak quite deliberately in terms that put political goals first and economic reality second.

But now reality is hitting the EU hard on the head. The attractions of wishful thinking have never seemed less persuasive.