What, you might ask, did Germany even have to do with the events in Rome this week? Good\u00a0question. Superficially, nothing. The Italians had run a campaign in which euro-zone politics barely featured. The winners were populists on the left and right, who tried to form an incoherent government with economic policies that would have\u00a0blown the euro zone apart<\/a>. When the populists nominated a euro-hater as finance minister, Italy\u2019s president refused. Now the government will be formed with a slightly different cabinet.<\/p>\n Below the surface, however, Germany has a lot to do with Italy\u2019s political crisis. That\u2019s because Germany represents the opposite of the ideas that, more or less, unite the southern euro area, from Greece to France and Italy. Whereas the south demands \u201csolidarity,\u201d\u00a0Germany fears a \u201ctransfer union,\u201d<\/a>in which northern money permanently subsidizes bad loans and fiscal licentiousness in the south. Where the south clamors for stimulus, Germany demands austerity. Where the south wants fiscal discretion, Germany insists on\u00a0strict Ordoliberal rules<\/a>.<\/p>\n These are not philosophies that can be reconciled in the long run, no matter how much Angela Merkel fudges in the short run. Instead, these cultural narratives force Europeans to metamorphose into the worst\u00a0stereotypes others have of them<\/a>. Germans become \u201cmore German,\u201d Italians \u201cmore Italian.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus Germans imagine southerners as dissolute and unreliable deadbeats. Der Spiegel ran a story titled \u201cThe moochers of Rome\u201d this week. Southerners, meanwhile, resent the finger-pointing, rules-obsessed Germans who presume to lecture them. They pounce on any hint of hypocrisy, which Germany often provides\u00a0by breaching EU rules<\/a>.<\/p>\n This psychological chasm dooms the (southern-flavored) proposals by Emmanuel Macron for reforming the eurozone. The northern countries\u00a0simply won\u2019t stand for it<\/a>. But the absence of such reforms also dooms the euro zone to another crisis, and then another, and another.<\/p>\n The time has come for supporters, not opponents, of the European idea to contemplate loosening, and even shrinking, the euro zone. Member countries that decide being in the euro club is against their economic interests or philosophies should have a way, temporarily or permanently, to return to a national currency without jeopardizing the entire euro zone. Meanwhile, European integration in other areas \u2014 security, foreign and defense policy, for example \u2014 should proceed irrespective of how the euro zone develops.<\/p>\n The idea of European integration was born in the rubble of World War II and has without any doubt grown into the greatest peace project in human history. No part of it, including the subordinate question of a common currency, must be allowed to sabotage that bigger idea, and to turn a peace project into a conflict machine.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"01](\"https:\/\/global.handelsblatt.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/01-p48-Southern-Europes-debt-burden-01.png\")