Nicholas Wapshott

Security worker opens the door of a government job center as people wait to enter in Marbella, Spain, December 2, 2011. REUTERS/Jon Nazca

In the nearly five years since the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, the remedy for the world’s economic doldrums has swung from full-on Keynesianism to unforgiving austerity and back.

The initial Keynesian response halted the collapse in economic activity. But it was soon met by borrowers’ remorse in the shape of paying down debt and raising taxes without delay. In the last year, full-throttle austerity has fallen out of favor with those charged with monitoring the world economy.

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been imposing singeing public spending cuts on her neighbors, and George Osborne, Britain’s finance minister, who has been doing the same to the Brits, to ease up. The IMF is now urging fiscal measures beyond monetary easing “to nurture a sustainable recovery and restore the resilience of the global economy.”

Earlier this month, Lagarde criticized America’s automatic sequester cuts for being too deep, too soon. The United States, she said, “should consolidate less in the short term, but give … economic actors the certainty that there will be fiscal consolidation going forward.”

When the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union, jaws dropped from Belfast to Belgrade. The citation said the EU had helped transform Europe “from a continent of war to a continent of peace,” and that its “most important result” was “the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights.” Many think that is a strange way of interpreting the last 100 years, given that the maintenance of a free Europe since the end of World War Two is due more to the thankless diligence of NATO and the unsung generosity of the United States.

The timing of the award was also puzzling. The very existence of the European Union is under severe threat as it struggles to maintain its common currency, the euro. To protect the euro, EU bureaucrats in Brussels and political leaders in Berlin and Paris have made the poorer member nations the target of austerity measures that threaten to undermine those nation’s democracies. Instead of celebrating the EU as a benign force for peace and trans-national cohesion, the Nobel Committee might just as easily have condemned it for using the global financial crisis as a pretext to double down on its grand plan to forge a single European state. The award by the notionally apolitical Nobel Committee – whose host country, Norway, chose in 1972 and again in 1994 not to join the EU – appeared to be a desperately needed vote of confidence for an ambitious dream that has turned into a divisive nightmare.

Neither awards nor plaudits will save the European Union. Central bankers alone won’t fix it, either. That’s because a lasting remedy for what’s ailing the region must be political as well as financial. The modern history of Europe largely revolves around the bitterly fought and seemingly eternal contest between France and Germany, with Europe’s third great power, Britain, sometimes wisely and often mischievously maintaining the balance. Both of the 20th century’s ruinous world wars and several other destructive conflicts stemmed from Franco-Prussian enmity. It was primarily to bring this perennial conflict to an end that the EU founders – French diplomat Jean Monnet, French statesman Robert Schuman and the Belgian premier Paul-Henri Spaak – envisioned a Europe in which the nations were bound ever closer by an economic pact. The other unstated aim was to create a single European state to rival the United States in population and wealth, and, as time went on, to compete with the burgeoning economies of India, China, Russia and Brazil.