As Herman Van Rompuy has pointed out, Europe has now reached a point where it can’t finance its social model anymore. Worse still, its financial ills could lead to a domino effect, in which: “Greek banks collapse, then French banks collapse, then U.S. banks collapse” – a pessimistic vision shared by the Washington Post, which remarks that “kicking the can down the road” has been the only response to these problems thus far. However, the newspaper warns that “Europe’s day of reckoning on its financial crisis is at hand.” European governments will “need to find common ground, and fast, lest Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy, and their colleagues, go down in history as the leaders who brought Europe, and the world, to the brink of economic disaster – and then over it.

“The EU has created a single currency, but it hasn’t forged a deeper political or fiscal union,” the magazine continues. Opinions differ on whether to centralize further or break up the EU.  There are historic precedents for both: look how the Russian ruble fell apart when “economic discrepancies became too great” between ex-Soviet countries who tried to keep using it after the collapse of the USSR. On the other hand, remember the Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis in 1992, which prompted many European countries to move “towards closer economic integration”? Whichever way, “the crisis reveals the choice and the choice has to be made.”

Paris bureau chief Steven Erlanger profiles the “odd couple” at the heart of what Krugman terms the “Euromess” – German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy – “She makes fun, in private, of the way he walks and talks, of his rapid, jerky gestures and facial grimaces. He mocks her deliberation, her reluctance, her matronly caution… They are the best hope Europe has for continued unity. But they do not like each other at all.” For the EU to work, however, “Sarkozy and Merkel have to get along.”

It is incomprehensible that "President Obama is keeping the EU away from the negotiations", declares Yossi Beilin in La Vanguardia. The former Israeli justice minister, president of the Geneva Initiative and former negotiator in the 2001 talks held at Taba, recalls that the principal steps in the peace process over the last 20 years have been made in Europe: the Madrid conference of 1991, as well as the agreements signed in Oslo (1993), Paris (1995) and Geneva (2003).

Beilin also observes that Obama is "aware of Europe's vast experience" and "knows that Europe will be called in over the three principal international problems" facing the establishment of a Palestinian state: finance, the question of who will participate in the multinational force for the protection of the Palestinian state, as well as the issue of who will help in the relocation of Palestinian refugees.

In light of these conditions, the former Israeli negotiator considers that Europe must not "beg" for a role in the renewed peace process, but must be "constantly implicated in the talks". This is what worked so well during the Madrid conference, where the "Europeans played a decisive and key part" in advancing the negotiations. Beilin believes that it is now up to "the United States and the other implicated parties" to ask that Europe also assume "a decisive role" in the talks.

Low-cost airlines, however, mean Europeans “are criss-crossing the continent like never before.” Continental integration, he argues, owes as much to Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary as to the EU founding fathers. Further evidence that a “people's Europe is slowly emerging” can be seen in the success of the Champions League. “If sport can become Europeanized,” he concludes, “there is no reason why politics cannot be. All we need now is the political equivalent of a Zinedine Zidane”.