The euro crisis brings one risk that financiers do not see: confusing Europe with a currency. The European project has many dimensions, none more important than making Europe count in the outside world. Like the euro, this effort is languishing without leadership. Like the euro, it is a challenge that cannot wait.
Making Europe matter should not be so hard. Detractors forget the EU is the world's largest economy, biggest donor and second-top military spender. Its population, far bigger than America's, enjoys an envied way of life. For a year, it has had a diplomatic arm: the European External Action Service. But the EEAS has not yet justified its decade-long gestation. It lacks the confidence of member states, and has fared badly in Brussels negotiations. Instead of defining a common European interest, it has been shaped by a squalid competition for jobs. There has been little elaboration of strategy. Lady Ashton, the high representative who runs the EEAS, is decent, but has not stepped into the first rank. This potentially historic role is not being fulfilled.
At the EEAS, a little vision would go a long way. If Europe is to have new diplomats, let it have a new kind of diplomacy. EEAS methods should suit today's open world, not that of the old foreign ministries. Its signature must be the universal values first forged in Europe. It must recruit widely for talent, find new ways to exploit the commission competences, and not rely on old tools like sanctions. It should yield new arts of multilateralism. In short, it must be more Hammarskjöld than Talleyrand.
A confident UK would treat the EEAS as a chance to amplify its voice, and would help make it work. Instead, William Hague has reduced his diplomats to wrangling over how and when the EU can speak. Britain is not alone in its myopia: leaders right across European capitals feel caught in a conundrum. They feel marginalised in a growing world and yet fear any loss of their own control from greater co-operation. The euro crisis might have been a cue to deal with the outside world more collaboratively, but national leaders did the opposite, turning towards bilateralism. Awkward messages on human rights are left to Brussels, while economic interests are pursued more separately. Bigger, richer members lose the chance to shape a strategic partnership on equal terms with the great powers; weaker, indebted countries are left vulnerable. How much influence has China bought along Europe's southern and eastern edge?
Some of the world's emerging powers are governed by repression; none has much regard for human rights in foreign policy. America's politics is in no state to renew the global institutions it invented. The difference between a progressive and a darker world thus turns upon Europe finding its voice.