with the UK out of the picture, the powerful mainly Western European members of the euro area had asserted themselves within the EU as a whole. They had established the possibility of EU debt, and on that basis they had given Brussels a meaningful countercyclical fiscal capacity. Skeptics would insist that it was no more than a provisional response to an emergency. Whether any of it would become permanent was an open question, but the precedent had been established. For once, undeniably, the EU had scored a political success. It broke the negative momentum that hung heavy over Europe in the
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