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France should make its pension system sustainable and improve its business environment. The Netherlands should reform its housing market by speeding up cuts in the tax deductibility of mortgage interest. Slovenia should improve governance and risk management at its banks.

These and numerous other recommendations for the EU’s 27 national governments emerged this week from the European Commission, the group’s executive arm. On paper they are sensible. Many an office in Brussels has been stuffed with similar material for years.

Yet in France the advice struck a nerve. President Fran ois Hollande observed tartly that the commission “cannot dictate to us what we have to do?.?.?.?On structural reforms, especially pension reform, it’s for us and only us to say what is the right way to att儿童癫痫能治好吗ain the objective.”

Mr Hollande’s response seemed ungrateful, given that the commission had sweetened its proposed medicine by giving France two more years to meet its budget deficit target. But it illustrated how some politicians find it hard to adjust to the new schema for fiscal discipline and economic governance that has evolved during five years of unrelenting sis.

By and large, national governments and parliaments formulate financial rescues of stricken countries. But it is the commission that has the power to monitor national economic and budgetary policies and, in extreme cases, to punish offending governments.

This development represents an attempt to rectify a flaw in the eurozone’s architecture that tics identified long before the banking and sovereign debt sis. In a nutshell, Europe created a common currency in 1999 but omitted a common fiscal or economic policy. Now it falls to the commission to defend the emerging framework of this essential second dimension of Europe’s monetary union.

The credibility of the new arrangements will depend on whether governments heed the commission – and on whether the commission is not afraid to bite governments as well as bark at them. In this context, Europe has a patchy record. A fiscal rule book, the stability and growth pact, was established in the 1990s at Germany’s insistence. Intended to keep a lid on budget deficits, it ended up doing nothing of the sort, having been swept aside in 2003 by a Social Democrat-led German government acting with France and Italy.

The risk today is that governments will prove too weak, unpopular and divided to honour their side of the bargain with the commission and carry out the economic reforms requested in return for postponed deficit targets. In conditions of recession, unemployment and rising populist political rivals, it would not be surprising if governments failed to achieve all that is asked of them.

It would be equally unsurprising if the commission decided that discretion was the better part of valour and held back from imposing sanctions. In that case, however, the new architecture of Europe’s monetary union would look very like the old: namely, a robust-looking supranational mechanism that in practice serves as a cover for governments to get away with whatever they like.

A second risk lies in the notion that a method of avoiding future crises is to “denationalise” and “depoliticise” economic policy by turning it into a technical exercise guided by the commission and national capitals. But in some countries, especially in southern Europe, to toy with such ideas is to play with fire.

For recession, debt and joblessness combine with the diminishing relevance of their governments to sap the national dignity of citizens and their sense of retaining control over their destiny. Over time this will not be compatible with the maintaining democracy.

For the eurozone, the irony of this week’s events is that the commission’s offer of easier deficit targets in return for economic reform was at once the most commonsense course to take – and the one most likely to sow the seeds of trouble.

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