THE British premier Gordon Brown would prefer Europe not to exist. If he had his way, politics would be played out in Britain, the transatlantic relationship and — his current unfortunate conceit — the world.

These are the chosen stages, real or delusional, on which the prime minister moves with assurance and a politically dangerous degree of hubris.

Europe, for him, is a sideshow by comparison, a distraction and worse, because in his mind it brings only penalties, not rewards. Not only would Brown prefer not to think about Europe; he would also prefer us to pretend that he does not think about it.

Yet think about it he must. The events of the week remind both the British and him of the extent to which this Europe-free vision is a piece of political escapism. As the economic crisis begins to settle into a way of life rather than an adrenalin rush, Europe is emerging through the fog as the international forum in which Britain`s economic fate — and Brown`s political fate — will be most decisively shaped in 2009.

With the pound falling to parity with the euro and an emerging strategic division between Britain and Germany, the events that matter are Brown`s Merkel-less talks with Barroso and Sarkozy in London, the economic summit in Brussels and the climate change talks in Poznan. Compared with these, the rest is grandstanding.

These are defining times not just for Europe`s economies but also for the shape, if any, of the European project that the next generation will inherit. This is fact, not opinion. Regardless of whether they are members of the eurozone or even of the EU, the simple reality is that unless Europe`s national economies coordinate their responses to the global downturn, they risk inflicting serious collective self-harm.

The degree of Europe`s economic, political and legal integration is now so great, the mutual dependence as trade partners so profound, and the collective European share of the global economy so large, that European agreement is as vital in the current emergency as disagreement would be destructive.

This is the far-from-ideal context in which events such as this week`s serious divisions with Germany, and the prospective second Irish referendum, should be understood. Europeans live in the Europe they have made for themselves, not in the Europe that they would like (or, in Brown`s case, would not like) to inhabit. Midway through his life-enhancing London stand-up show about the history of everything, Eddie Izzard says something that illuminates why this matters. He tells his audience that human beings never really needed the Ten Commandments in the first place. Actually, we only needed one commandment — to do as you would be done by; and perhaps a second — to remember that what goes around comes around.

The controversial Newsweek interview with the German finance minister Peer Steinbruck exemplifies how, in politics, what goes around always comes around. In the interview, Steinbruck laments the “breathtaking” policy switch that some governments, including Brown`s, have made “from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism”. His exasperation calls to mind the old communist jibe against errant comrades who were only ever on the party line while they were crossing it from right to left and back again.

What is needed instead is “a little steadiness and continuity”, says the man who is, lest we forget, the single most important finance minister in Europe.

Ordinarily that would be right and, even in today`s circumstances, Steinbruck has a point. After all, it`s not the German economic and social model that has suddenly come apart at the seams, but the UK`s. I`m aware that those of us who like and admire Germany need to be specially vigilant to also bear witness to Germany`s failings and limitations — which not only exist but have been inadequately addressed by successive German governments.

Not surprisingly, it is to German taxpayers that Europe`s more feckless governments, like Italy, are now turning to bail them out of their difficulties.

And when Brown and the other critics point to Germany`s much higher level of structural unemployment than in the UK for example, with the implication that Britain has been more dynamic in getting its citizens off welfare and into work, let them also remember that only Germany has had to absorb an economically shattered country — the old East Germany — into its borders. If Britain had been faced with 16 million new East British citizens over the past 20 years, the Brown boom might not have been as large as it was, or have lasted as long as it did.

It must be hard for Germans to take lectures from Brown. For more than 11 years he has descended on continental Europe for brief visits — always luridly well-trailed in the British tabloid press — in which he has lost no opportunity to lecture Germany from the free-market right about the shortcomings of its social market economic model. Now, with no word of apology, he is lecturing them again, this time from the diametrically opposite statist left.
— The Guardian, London