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What fun it is to predict the future! You can paint the most outrageous scenarios, and no one can prove you’re wrong because they haven’t happened yet.

This thought crossed my mind when I was reading Global Trends 2025, the report published last month by the US intelligence community. Here is the bit where they talk about the risk of a global pandemic: “Tens to hundreds of millions of Americans within the US homeland would become ill and deaths would mount into the tens of millions. Outside the US, critical infrastructure degradation and economic loss on a global scale would result, as approximately a third of the worldwide population became ill and hundreds of millions died.”

And they say Americans are optimists.

The report’s forecasts for the European Union are tame by comparison, but they have the ring of truth. The most important sentence goes: “Continued failure to convince sceptical publics of the benefits of deeper economic, political and social integration, and to grasp the nettle of a shrinking and ageing population by enacting painful reforms, could leave the EU a hobbled giant distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas and less able to translate its economic clout into global influence.”

To a large extent, the authors are merely describing the EU as it is today and saying that there’s no reason to think things will change much by 2025. This also goes for their prediction of “deepening ethnic cleavages” in western European societies, as the Muslim population grows but is disproportionately confined to low-status, low-wage jobs.

For a European reader, the report’s most startling prediction is surely that “crime could be the gravest threat inside Europe as Eurasian transnational organisations - flush from involvement in energy and mineral concerns - become more powerful and broaden their scope. One or more governments in central and eastern Europe could fall prey to their domination.”

I love the choice of the word “Eurasian”. The authors presumably have in mind Russian-led organised crime groups with political connections, but to call them “Eurasian” makes them seem much more sinister and slippery - rather like the bad guys in a James Bond movie.

As for what nation, or nations, might fall under the control of the dastardly Eurasians, it’s unclear if the US intelligence folk are thinking of countries already in the EU or countries outside. Inside, you would have to go for Bulgaria on present form - unless Dominique de Villepin can work his magic.

Outside, it could be any of them, from Montenegro and Moldova to Bosnia and Belarus. But of course, there’s no way of knowing. If only we could skip the financial crisis and recession and move to 2025 tomorrow!

It is only human to search for a ray of light in the European Union’s ever-darkening financial landscape. Could it take the form of an unexpected boost to the cause of EU political and economic integration?

One such optimist, a genial and perceptive diplomat who has immersed himself in EU affairs for the past 30 years, suggested to me the other day that it often takes a crisis to inject real momentum into what he and others in Brussels like to call “the European project”.  For example, the 1992 crisis in the European exchange mechanism appeared to deal a serious blow to the goal of creating a single European currency. But the reaction was spirited. Only seven years later, the euro was up and running.

Similarly, it took the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 to prompt EU leaders into agreeing, at a summit just three months later, on the principle of a European arrest warrant. This allows the swift transfer of criminal suspects for trial and detention from one EU member-state to another. It proved effective in securing the extradition from Italy to the UK of Hussain Osman, an Ethiopian-born Briton accused of involvement in a plot to attack London’s transport system in July 2005.

On the face of things, the financial crisis offers a perfect opportunity to push forward closer European integration. If a big cross-border European financial institution fell into trouble , it would be ludicrous to argue that it was purely a matter for the government of the country where the institution has its headquarters. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the former Italian finance minister and European Central Bank executive board member, thinks the financial crisis merely reinforces the case for a powerful pan-European regulator that he used to make in front of his EU colleagues.

However, the response of governments so far indicates that they are not ready - yet - for a Great Leap Forward in terms of closer integration. This was well illustrated last week by the curious tale of the French plan for European bank bail-out fund, which turned out, after a feverish 24-hour news cycle, not to be a French plan for a European bank bail-out after all.

Only the Dutch authorities were brave enough to state publicly that, yes, they thought such a plan would be a pretty good idea. But given the opposition of the UK and , more importantly, Germany - still the EU’s paymaster and the country that would surely bear the brunt of the cost of such a fund - the plan was dead before it started.

Of course, European integration can come in many shapes and sizes and an EU bank bail-out fund doesn’t have to be one of them. But solidarity among all 27 EU member-states is a a fundamental principle. Without it, the EU is nothing. If a large bank fails in an EU country that does not have the resources to rescue it, it will not be long before that principle is put to the test.