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By Paul Mason - BBC News The years of steady enrichment in Europe seem to be at an end. Gone is the confident talk of prosperity through unity, instead the focus is on the great financial crisis welling up on the union's southern fringe, as a rising sea of debt threatens to drown the dreams of millions across the continent. Europe has become the weak link in the world economy
When it gets dark the drug dealers come out in Exarchia Square. The students walk past them in little groups, deep in argument and abstract thought. Posters shout at you in vivid colours: against capitalism - against police brutality. The riot cops rest, exhausted, against the street corners. This is a typical scene from a place called Europe.
If you had to re-enact it, 1,000 years from now, you could reconstruct the whole thing from the costumes - the square sunglasses bourgeois women use to hold their hair back - the jeans and stubble of the manual working men who flood the streets of central Athens when there's a general strike.
Layered, tribal, intensely urban, sporadically violent, intellectual, tolerant and until now resilient - this is the civilisation the European Union was set up in after 1945.
The euro currency was supposed to harmonise it all, but it now faces its biggest challenge for decades because Europe has become the weak link in the world economy.
While China and America have recovered, Europe has been pushed through a door marked austerity.
American disease?
The eurozone has a currency and a central bank but no central government. In place of that, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty imposed common rules: low budget deficits, national debts below 60% of GDP, no bailouts and no central bank intervention in the market for government debt.
At the time, all this seemed like a good idea. It was the prevailing economic doctrine. But if you live long enough, you do tend to see today's economic doctrine become wrapping paper for tomorrow's souvlaki.
Fast forward to 2010. Europe has survived the credit crunch. The banks infected by that horrible American disease have been saved by medicine dispensed by the European Central Bank.
So mild is Europe's recession that President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel have the moral high ground at G20 summits.
The problem is that, just as with Wall Street, the rules were a fiction.
The Greek government, with the help of Goldman Sachs, had moved some of its debts "off balance sheet", just like Enron and Lehman Brothers.
The industrial giants of northern Europe want rigid rules on tax, spending and borrowing enforced... northern Europe has seized control of southern Europe.
As the truth emerged with the election of a new government, Greece's deficit doubled.
Twice, Greece drew up plans to slash that deficit. Twice they were approved by Europe and twice the expected bailout failed to emerge.
Then, those who lend money to southern Europe realized they might not get it all back...MORE...
