The migrant surge is not just the biggest crisis ever to hit the European Union but the one that will break it. Break it because it has exposed how corruption, cronyism and cowardice have hollowed out a once-grand institution.

Brussels, and the governments of many of its member states, are filled with the craven and opportunist, so-called leaders who, ever since the end of the Cold War, have specialised in an ideology that can reduced to just one word: fudge.

The fudge – putting off every problem as long as possible – has been deployed for the wine lake, the beef mountain and Greek debt, along with introducing a single currency run by a central bank accountable to nobody. But the surge of migrants into the continent from every border will see the whole rotten structure come crashing down.

That much was clear last week when European leaders suddenly announced their determination to solve the migrant crisis, spurred by a grim photograph of a drowned boy washed up on the Turkish coast.

Hundreds of such children have been drowned for the past two years as ever rising numbers of migrants beat a path to Europe, the only difference here being that this poor boy was photographed.

The knee-jerk reaction of EU leaders to this one event tells you all you need to know about a leadership class that ignores every problem if it possibly can. Not least because their solution last week was not action but, incredibly, the promise only of a conference to debate the problem.

This is despite the fact that migrant numbers are mind boggling. More than 350,000 have arrived from Libya and Turkey this year and Germany expects to process more than 800,000, including hundreds of thousands from the Balkans.

And what no unelected Brussels bureaucrat is willing to talk about is what happens next year. Migrant numbers into Europe have doubled for the past few years. Next year, they will pass the million mark. Where are those migrants to go?

Already, the system supposed to deal with migrants is broken. Schengen, the visa-free access to a borderless Europe, has been swamped by migrants. So has the Dublin Convention, which stipulates that refugees must claim asylum in the first EU State they enter; Greece, Italy and Hungary are overwhelmed. And when Hungary has the temerity to build a border fence, Europe turns on them, saying no. When EU leaders are asked just how many will be let in they fall silent.

This one event tells you all you need to know about a leadership class that ignores every problem if it possibly can

In this catastrophic cowardice the EU leaders have a willing accomplice among much of the mainstream media. The media are happy to report on the plight of the migrants without bothering to question who is to pay for their settlement. In fact, the media and EU leaders have much in common.

It won’t be their elite communities that have to absorb so many migrants and their jobs won’t be threatened by this massive influx.

Ask a working class East European how he feels about a migrant getting more from benefits than he makes from hard work, or indeed taking his job, and see what he says.

The voters are now starting to notice. The 2014 European elections resulted in Eurosceptic parties making huge gains, such as UKIP in the UK, the National Front in France, the People’s Party in Denmark, Syriza in Greece, Sinn Féin in Ireland and the Five Star Movement in Italy. In their different ways, these parties have one thing in common: rejection of the EU’s cosy consensus.

The ordinary people know that Europe is full. Unemployment is high – one in four of young Spaniards is out of work – and welfare budgets are already stretched as states cope with stratospheric levels of public debt.

The EU talks of distributing hundreds of thousands of migrants across the Union with no idea how to pay for it.

The inability to even confront the migrant crisis will doom the EU to fail. Its crash will not be spectacular but gradual. You can see it already.

States are already breaking away, settling matters among themselves and ignoring the mirage of the Union. The EU is set to join a long list of institutions – including the UN itself ­– which stumble on, ignored by those they once hoped to govern.

Also irrelevant will be the European Project, a project dedicated to making the continent beholden to an unelected bureaucracy in which nobody would need to work hard and everyone would get benefits.

The Americans, a nation raised on the ideals of hard work, have a bumper sticker that the EU should have taken notice of decades ago: no taxation without representation. The EU’s unelected bosses ignored it then and are ignoring it now and this abject failure, as migrant numbers continue to explode on the continent, will doom the EU to collapse.

Richard Galustian is a security analyst.