Conventional wisdom in Brussels holds that nothing helps the cause of European integration like a crisis: the battles of the exchange-rate mechanism in the 1990s led to the Euro, the 9/11 terrorist attacks to greater judicial cooperation, and now the financial meltdown is spurring an ever-stronger European response.

As Jacques Delors, former Commission president, put it in a recent speech, firefighters battling crises soon make way for architects.

Proponents of this vision would do well to read Otmar Issing’s comment piece in Tuesday’s FT. Read more