And I think this is an important reason why many Europeans, especially on the left, currently identify "German policies", or even (shudder) "Germany", as the villains in the current crisis, rather than blaming Merkel and Sarkozy, for example.

Bear with me for a minute : Merkel, who visibly doesn't have any ideas of her own on macroeconomic policy or currency governance, muddles along making non-decisions, digging her heels in stupidly, delaying then accepting the inevitable, but too late to stop the crisis getting worse... but all the while working within the framework of conventional economic wisdom in Germany.

And as Germany is the economic hegemon within the Eurozone (as largest economy, and most "virtuous", since they are on the credit side of the imbalances), German conventional wisdom, in all its majestic stupidity, is the EU orthodoxy.

It's the madness of this conventional wisdom that we must fight. You are quite right that the conventional wisdom is widely shared by economic policy makers and political elites in other countries (though we may note that the French PS has rejected the "golden rule" that the SPD embraced).

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}