Brexit: Fraying union

Denmark is seen as one of the countries most vulnerable to contagion if Britain were to vote to leave the EU. In many ways, the Danish are the most British of continental Europeans when it comes to Brussels, delaying its EU membership until the UK became a member in 1973 and remaining the only other country with an "opt-out" of the EU requirement to join the euro.

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Although EU leaders believe Scandinavia and the "Visegrad Four" countries in central and eastern Europe -- Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic -- would feel the most immediate pressure from a British exit because of longstanding anti-EU sentiment in those blocs, leading voices from "core Europe" are now lending support for similar ventures.

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In the Netherlands, a founding member of both the EU and the euro, Geert Wilders, whose far-right Freedom party has held a commanding lead in national polls for months, recently said a British exit would make it easier for his country to leave the EU -- something he promised to deliver should he become prime minister. "The beginning of the end of the EU has already started," he said last month. "And it can be an enormous incentive for other countries if the UK would leave."

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The noise has begun to reverberate so much that Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, confessed this month that he was "really afraid" Britain's referendum would prove "a very attractive model for some politicians in Europe to achieve some internal, very egotistical goals".

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"I am a firm believer in the EU, but I think that the elites' traditional sermons no longer work," says Hubert Vedrine, a former French foreign minister. "They even infuriate people and are counter-productive."

Mr Barroso says he does not rule out simultaneous developments: some countries moving towards closer integration while a handful of threads on the periphery get pulled out of the sweater entirely.