Many were children of nomadic herders, who moved south in May and June in search of better pastures. When they arrived, brown domes made of crisscrossed branches and layers of multicolored mats would appear like crowds of dappled beetles on the outskirts of town.

EU lethargy and growing irrelevance in global public affairs owes much to Eurocentric political atavism. One potential benefit of the Copenhagen debacle could be that it forces the Union to wake up to the new world of the twenty first century.

The Bank of Japan and the ECB were, characteristically, the slowest to react, keeping their policy rates higher for longer, and not undertaking QE and other extraordinary liquidity measures until late in the day. Indeed, it required new leaders in both institutions Haruhiko Kuroda at the BOJ and Mario Draghi at the ECB finally to set monetary policy right.