Ask a minister in a European Union government what post their country hopes to get in the next European Commission, and the response is the same every time - something important to do with the economy.  Well, you can’t blame people for not hurrying to step into the shoes of Leonard Orban, the Romanian commissioner for multilingualism.

On the other hand, there aren’t enough top economic jobs for Commission president José Manuel Barroso to satisfy everyone.  Truth to tell, the Commission looks too big with 27 members.  But that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it will stay under the EU’s Lisbon treaty.  A guaranteed seat on the Commission seems a simple, visible way of making a country’s citizens feel connected to the EU.

The main four economic portfolios in Barroso’s outgoing Commission have been - in no particular order - competition, the internal market, trade, and economic and monetary affairs.  These have been occupied by the Netherlands, Ireland, Britain and Spain respectively.  By contrast, France has held two lesser posts (first transport, then justice, freedom and security), and Germany has dropped almost completely out of sight in the post of enterprise and industry.

As Barroso puts together his new team, France and Germany are in the hunt for really big jobs and feel no doubt that they deserve them because of their relatively diminished status in the outgoing Commission.  The French and Germans want to play a much more direct role in shaping the EU’s economic and financial policies as the EU struggles to emerge from recession, rewrites its rules on financial regulation and defends its industries in world markets.  France is said to desire the internal market job on the Commission, and Germany would like something equally prominent.

All this is causing some nervousness in Britain and a few like-minded countries that the next Commission will be less free market-oriented than its predecessor.  In response I would make two points.  First, this is the spirit of the age - you can expect nothing less after the recent near-meltdown of the western world’s financial system and the associated regulatory failures.

But secondly, it just does not follow that to give a top economic dossier to France or Germany means that the Commission will be wrenched in the direction of some manically illiberal étatisme and fiendishly pro-Volkswagen industrial policy.  To take one excellent example, Pascal Lamy, the Frenchman who served as trade commissioner from 1999 to 2004, was a robust defender of free trade and now is head of the World Trade Organisation.  The same would be true if the next French commissioner were someone like Christine Lagarde, who at present is President Nicolas Sarkozy’s finance minister (she is still a possible choice, some think, even though it looks as if Sarkozy is going for Michel Barnier).

EU commissioners, at their best, are like US Supreme Court justices.  When a president picks a judge to sit on America’s highest court, everyone’s first thought is, “Here we go, a blatant political appointment designed to push the Court in a certain ideological direction”.  Then, more often than not, the nominee causes a surprise by putting the court’s interests first and acting independently.  So it can be at the Commission, where the institutional culture of independence from political pressure is stronger than many on the outside assume.

A couple of months ago, some European Union policymakers talked despairingly of how 2009 risked turning out to be “a wasted year”.  Now the EU is on a roll.  The impasse over José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president was removed last month when the European parliament stopped playing games and renewed his term of office.

And all of a sudden, it looks as if “a decade of deadening debate over the European Union’s institutional shape” - as British foreign secretary David Miliband puts it in today’s FT - will soon come to an end, after Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon treaty produced a massive majority in favour.  It may not be long before the EU has its first full-time president, a new head of foreign policy and a new Commission with a five-year mandate serving under Barroso.

So is all rosy in the European garden?  Not quite.  The principal problem, as it has been for the past two years, is the financial crisis.  Time and time again, as I peek into the future, I find myself disturbed by the terrible condition of Europe’s public finances and the strains that this will put on the eurozone’s unity.

In a newly published report, economists at Barclays Capital look at the evolution of the eurozone’s public debt-to-gross domestic product ratio up to the middle of the next decade.  In one scenario, which assumes an annual fiscal adjustment of 2 per cent of GDP, 4 per cent inflation and 3 per cent economic growth, the eurozone’s average debt would be 65 per cent in 2016.  That is not bad (though it’s above the 60 per cent threshold set for new entrants into the eurozone).

But just look at the differences between the area’s member-states.  The German debt would be 40 per cent of GDP, the Dutch debt 37 per cent, the Finnish debt 12 per cent.  But the Greek debt would be 150 per cent, the Irish debt 126 per cent and the Portuguese debt 89 per cent.  In footballing terms, this would be like Barcelona and Chelsea playing in the same league as Atromitos Athens and the Tralee Dynamos.

This scenario, by the way, is not Barclays Capital’s “base case”, which is more pessimistic, estimating average eurozone debt at 90 per cent of GDP in 2016.  But the same enormous divergence between, say, Germany and Greece is evident: German debt would be 64 per cent, Greek debt 171 per cent.

With such bleak forecasts, it is entirely understandable that German policymakers dislike proposals for issuing common eurozone bonds.  But the financial crisis is testing to the limit the eurozone’s ability to conduct a properly co-ordinated fiscal policy.  When interest rates start going up again, as they will, this will present a far bigger challenge for the EU than getting Barroso reappointed or passing the Lisbon treaty.

Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon treaty on Friday should in principle be about the treaty’s contents, not the state of the Irish economy.  But the economy’s collapse over the past 12 months compels both pro-Lisbon and anti-Lisbon forces to confront the question of whether membership of the European Union - and, specifically, of the eurozone - has helped (even saved) Ireland, made things worse, or not made much difference one way or the other.

An interesting angle from which to approach this question is to ask whether Ireland has fared better than another island off the north-west coast of Europe that was thrown into turmoil at almost exactly the same moment last year - namely, Iceland.  Iceland isn’t a EU member and doesn’t use the euro.  Has this accelerated Iceland’s recovery or held it back?

In terms of headline gross domestic product figures, Iceland comes out narrowly ahead.  Over the last four quarters, its economy has contracted by a cumulative 3.8 per cent, almost half Ireland’s 7.4 per cent, according to a Deutsche Bank study.  But the inflation numbers paint a different picture: Iceland’s consumer price index is up 10.9 per cent since August, Ireland’s is down 2.4 per cent.  Both countries, of course, have horrendously high budget deficits - 13.5 per cent of GDP predicted this year for Iceland, 12 per cent for Ireland.

Unquestionably, the main difference relates to each nation’s external exchange rate and, by extension, its international business competitiveness.  The Icelandic krona all but collapsed after the crisis broke out, whereas Ireland, using the euro, could not devalue.  The result is that Iceland’s unit labour costs have fallen by 29 per cent over the past 12 months and by an astonishing 45. 6 per cent from their peak in the fourth quarter of 2005.   

By contrast, Irish unit labour costs have dropped by only 4.3 per cent over the past year - and this has occurred more because of painful adjustments in the real economy (unemployment, reduced working time, reduced bonuses and wage cuts) than because of exchange rate factors (a falling euro).  Irish exports to the UK have been affected by the steep fall in the pound against the euro.

Of course, the geyser that is the Icelandic economy is still throwing up columns of noxious steam.  Iceland remains vulnerable because of the unparalleled damage inflicted on its financial sector and sovereign debt position.

But the hard truth is that Ireland - like fellow eurozone members Italy, Greece and Spain - has a long and hard road ahead to claw back its competitiveness.  And this is a lesson with even broader implications for Europe.  For when the dust settles, it may well emerge that the financial crisis has served to accentuate the differences in competitive advantage in the eurozone between, on the one hand, Germany and other star performers such as Finland and the Netherlands and, on the other, Ireland and the Mediterranean countries.

Since February 1999, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s anti-bribery convention came into force - with the aim of reducing bribery of foreign officials in international business deals - the US has brought 103 cases, Germany more than 40, France 19 and the UK just one.  So says “Global Corruption Report 2009: Corruption and the Private Sector”, a study published on Wednesday by Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog.

From a British point of view, the report makes uncomfortable reading.  “UK companies still have a long way to go to increase their awareness and adopt robust anti-bribery compliance programmes,” it says.

It adds that, in the light of the 2006 al-Yamamah affair,  when the authorities cited national security reasons to shut down a corruption investigation into a multibillion-pound British arms deal with Saudi Arabia, ”it is essential for the government to improve its enforcement of the [OECD] convention and bring more cases to court.  The government and companies need to raise their game.  Otherwise the United Kingdom will be perceived as a country that is not serious about fighting international corruption.”

Of course, other nations come in for a hammering in the report, too.  Take the so-called BRIC countries, supposedly jumping from strength to strength as the western world drowns in recession and debt.  Everyone from President Dmitry Medvedev to the man in the Moscow metro knows about Russia’s corruption disease, but it is particularly interesting to read what Transparency International says about the club’s other three members: “Firms from India, China and Brazil are regarded by their peers as among the most corrupt when doing business abroad.”

Has international business corruption increased since the global financial crisis exploded?  The report doesn’t really answer this important question.  But it does point to “the hazardous implications of corporate strategies that seek to exploit weak regulation, taxation and disclosure standards in some pockets of the global banking system”.  It also highlights “financial offshore structures whose lack of transparency, regulatory oversight and co-operation facilitate capital flight and tax evasion, while hindering the recovery of public assets stolen by corrupt rulers”.

Better regulation and more effective enforcement of existing rules are obviously the answer.  But let’s not forget what Tacitus, the great Roman senator and historian, said: “It’s the most corrupt state that has the most laws.”

It’s less than a week since General Motors agreed to sell Opel, its European arm, to a group led by Magna International of Canada, but already a wave of anger at the implications of the deal is building up.  Nowhere is this more true than in Belgium and the UK, where workers at GM plants seem far more at risk than their colleagues in Germany of losing their jobs.

This episode is, however, about much more than potential job losses.  It’s about Europe’s reluctance to come to terms with huge overcapacity in its car industry.  It’s about how best to preserve a broad manufacturing base in an era when the other main recent driver of European economic growth - lightly regulated financial capitalism - is discredited.  Finally, it is a test of the European Commission’s ability to uphold its strict rules on competition and state aid during the worst recession in the European Union’s history.

Lord Mandelson, the British government minister responsible for business and innovation, told the BBC this morning that he hoped the Commission (of which he was a member until last year) “should not accept anything that looks like a political fix” in the Opel deal.  This remark came very close to accusing the German government of offering shedloads of financial aid to Opel - €4.5bn, to be precise - in return for a promise not to sack carworkers in Germany as the nation heads towards a general election on September 27.

This is, of course, exactly how matters are viewed in Belgium, where politicians fear that Opel’s plant in Antwerp has been earmarked for closure.  As Kris Peeters, who heads the government of the Flanders region, bluntly put it in July: “Those who put more money on the table win.”  The Flanders government had tried its best, offering up to €500m to Opel, but the Germans crushed them with a sum nine times bigger.

The Commission made clear last Friday that it intended to study very closely the terms of the Opel sale.  According to Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, some Commission experts think the Antwerp plant may be more efficient than the Opel factory in Bochum, one of four company plants in Germany.  But don’t hold your breath on this one.  In EU institutions as much as in German politics, the power of the German car industry lobby is something to behold.

The truth of the matter is that almost no one in the EU, whether in government or in the car industry, wants to face up to the chronic problem of overcapacity.  Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne is an honourable exception, but he lost out early in the scramble for GM’s European assets.

As surely as night follows day, there will be a loser in all this.  And at the moment, it looks like being the German taxpayer.

Like much public life in the European Union, José Manuel Barroso’s battle to win reappointment as European Commission president is a battle of low politics dressed up in high ideals.  Barroso will be denied a second five-year term unless he secures the approval of the European Parliament, where a vote on his future should have taken place in July but was postponed until mid-September.  Now the moment of truth is close.  What can Barroso say and do to win over his socialist, Green and liberal critics?

One clue came in a speech, almost entirely ignored by the media, that Barroso delivered last week at a Barcelona business school.  Here he all but set out his policy programme for the next five years.  The speech’s most important passage read as follows: “The recent recovery spots are fragile and do not allow for any complacency.  In any case, it is clear that global growth will not return to pre-crisis levels for some time - if at all.  Those growth rates - and the economic model behind them - were simply not sustainable.”

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Barroso’s opponents will not be alone in asking whether the Commission president did not in fact spend much of his first term promoting the very same growth model, based on financial market innovation, deregulation and cheap capital, that he now says was unsustainable.  Still, as he points out, “the failure to predict and head off the crisis was a collective failure”, with economists, bankers, regulators, supervisors and politicians all sharing responsibility.

What model should the EU embrace in the future?  Barroso lists seven “new sources of growth”: a) open global markets and investment regimes; b) maximising the potential of the EU’s single market; c) building networks such as high-speed broadband and energy interconnections; d) innovation policies, including a new emphasis on government procurement and intellectual property strategy; e) improving employees’ skills so that they can switch from declining industries to new sectors; f) developing a low-carbon economy; and g) improving the quality of public expenditure.

It all sounds sensible enough.  A Commission president is not an economic policy tsar for Europe.  But he or she can offer a vision, speaking up for the EU’s collective interest when national leaders find it inconvenient to do so.  Barroso, in his speech, was consciously selecting policy areas where he knows he could make a difference by stating the case for common European action.

Whether it will be enough to appease his parliamentary critics is another matter.

From a European Union perspective, it’s somewhat surprising that the extraordinary financial crisis we’ve been living through has not generated more pressure for another big push at EU integration - if not in the political sphere, then at least in the economic one.  According to conventional EU wisdom, it usually takes a crisis to make Europeans understand why closer integration is a good thing.  But on this occasion, it’s not happening - or at least, not yet.

For the perfect explanation as to why this should be so, I recommend an article by Otmar Issing, the European Central Bank’s former chief economist, in the latest issue of the journal Europe’s World.  Issing’s article discusses the merits of issuing common bonds for the 16-nation eurozone - an initiative that would, in theory, mark a major step forward in European integration - and comes down firmly against the proposal.

Why?  The idea appeals to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s monetary affairs commissioner, Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s finance minister, and many others.  Supporters of a common eurozone bond contend, in essence, that there is strength in numbers and (a more slippery point) that European solidarity is a noble cause.

They say financial markets would show respect for bonds collectively guaranteed by Germany, France and 14 other countries.  A common bond would put paid to the “unfair” practice by which markets have forced countries such as Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal to pay substantially higher interest rates on their government bonds, relative to Germany, during the financial crisis.  Europe would stand as one.

Here is Issing’s stony response: “A common eurozone bond would certainly imply that countries like France and Germany would have to pay higher interest rates, and that would in the end mean higher tax burdens for their citizens…  Issuing a common bond would be a first step on the slippery road to ‘bail-outs’, and thus the end of the euro area as a zone of stability.” 

With an eye on Greece, Ireland and Italy, he continues: “The immediate trigger and the root cause of rising spreads were financial markets’ growing concerns about the solidity of some eurozone countries.  This loss of credibility has been a consequence of dramatic deteriorations in their current and expected fiscal positions.  But a common bond is no cure for a lack of fiscal discipline; on the contrary, it would tend to encourage countries to continue on their wrong fiscal course.”

In other words, Greeks and Italians in particular should get their houses in order (the Irish are already trying).  German taxpayers have no obligation to shell out for any country that isn’t hard at work consolidating its public finances.  So says Issing, and Germany’s coalition government shares his views - while admitting sotto voce that if a weak eurozone country fell into truly serious difficulties, Germany would have no choice but to come to the rescue.

Issing’s argument is undeniably powerful.  But I ask myself one question.  The public debts of Greece and Italy are set to shoot up over the next few years.  There doesn’t seem much evidence of an effort in either country to tackle the problem with the determination that Issing regards as necessary.  The longer it’s put off, the harder the task will be.  Just how are they to be persuaded to do it?

German chancellor Angela Merkel is usually a model of diplomatic politeness when she talks in public about Germany’s allies.  Not last Tuesday, however.

Towards the end of a speech in Berlin, she criticised the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and to a lesser extent the European Central Bank for responding to the global economic crisis with an unorthodox and irresponsible splurge of money creation.  Unless the central banks reversed these policies, she warned, the western world would find itself in the same kind of mess 10 years from now that it’s in today.

Well, she may be right, or she may not.  But what struck me most about this speech wasn’t her predictions of doom.  It was the carefully differentiated language that she used in speaking of the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB.  Hastily written news stories and commentaries have assumed that she made more or less the same criticisms of each central bank.  Not so.

In the ECB’s case, she said: “Even the European Central Bank has bowed to some extent to international pressure with the purchase of covered bonds.”  In other words, “international pressure” - from what country or countries, she omits to say - is to blame for the ECB’s alleged recklessness.  ECB policymakers get a rap on the knuckles for bowing to this mysterious pressure.  But fundamentally, Merkel seems to be saying, it’s not the ECB’s fault.  It is the fault of foreigners who are putting pressure on the ECB.

In the Fed’s case, Merkel’s language was much stronger - and in the case of the Bank of England, it positively dripped with sarcasm and contempt.  Here’s what she said:  “I view with great scepticism, for example, the extent of the Fed’s powers, and the way that the Bank of England has also worked out its own little line in Europe.”

Don’t you love that word “little”?  It is a word that is disrespectful and totally superfluous to Merkel’s argument, and yet the German chancellor has chosen to include it.  In fact, the tone of her language is so dismissive of the Bank of England that one has to wonder what was bugging her and her speechwriters when they drafted this sentence.

Almost 20 years after reunification, it is a commonplace to say that Germany has become a normal European country.  Merkel’s speech proves it once and for all.