EU summit and the euro crisis: Step by step, with a ripped map

IN JUNE this year, when Spain seemed to be close to succumbing to the crisis, European leaders appeared to make an important conceptual leap. The euro’s agony could not be ended simply through ever-tougher enforcement of the fiscal rules, deficit-cutting and economic reforms by individual countries and, in extremis, bailout loans. Instead, the euro zone would have to start moving towards greater pooling of sovereignty and sharing of liabilities.Six months on, the European summit (December 13th-14th) that was supposed to decide how to move towards a greater degree of fiscal federalism has just ended with a demonstration of how far European leaders have retreated from such notions. Instead of approving a road-map to create what Eurocrats call “a genuine economic and monetary union” (an implicit admission that the existing currency zone is rather fake) over the coming decade, they agr...