PARIS — European leaders are working overtime on a tentative deal to try to save the euro , which they hope to complete at a crucial summit meeting in Brussels this week. But rather than one transformative leap, the deal will have several moving parts, together meant to show resolve to protect Italy and Spain, revise the economic governance of the euro zone and prevent further debt crises, officials involved in the talks say. 
 
 The emerging solution is being negotiated under great pressure from the markets, the banks, the voters and the Obama administration, which wants an end to the uncertainty about the euro that is dragging down the global economy. 
 
 In the process, European leaders will begin to change the fundamental structure of the union, creating a form of centralized oversight of national budgets, with sanctions for the profligate, to reassure investors that this kind of sovereign-debt crisis is finally being managed and should not happen again. 
 
 The immediate focus of worry is on Italy and Spain, which have been buffeted by market speculation even as they move to fix their economies. That process took an important step on Sunday, as Italy’s cabinet agreed to a package of austerity measures to put the country in line for aid that would improve its financial stability. 
 
 The new euro package, as European and American officials describe it, is being negotiated along four main lines. It combines new promises of fiscal discipline that will be embedded in amendments to European treaties; a leveraging of the current bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to perhaps two or even three times its current balance; a tranche of money from the International Monetary Fund to augment the bailout fund; and quiet political cover for the European Central Bank to keep buying Italian and Spanish bonds aggressively in the interim, to ensure that those two countries — the third- and fourth-largest economies in the euro zone — are not driven into default by ruinous interest rates on their debt. 
 
 But important disagreements persist, and the two primary leaders of the euro zone, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, will meet on Monday in Paris to try to hammer out a joint proposal for the summit meeting. That meeting, which begins Thursday evening, is considered a last chance this year to set the euro right, even as some investors and analysts are beginning to predict its collapse. 
 
 “The survival of the euro zone is in play,” one senior European official said. “So far it’s been too little, too late.” 
 
 After consecutive, expensive failures to stabilize the markets and protect the euro, the broad plan emerging this week may have a better chance at succeeding, analysts say, in part because it weaves together measures that deal with the various issues of the euro, particularly the provision of a central authority that can monitor and override national budget decisions if they break the rules. 
 
 Still, even if all the parts are agreed upon in the meetings, which are bound to be fraught, the fundamental imbalances in the euro zone between north and south and between surplus countries and debtor ones will not go away. The euro will still be a single currency for 17 disparate nations in the European Union. 
 
 One dividing line is that the Germans, along with the Dutch and the Finns, remain adamantly opposed to what some consider the simplest solution: allowing the European Central Bank to become the euro zone’s lender of last resort and to buy sovereign bonds on the primary market, in unlimited amounts. Mrs. Merkel is also dead-set for now against collective debt instruments, like “eurobonds,” that would put taxpayers, particularly German ones, on the hook for the debt of others, which her government regards as illegal. 
 
 So Mr. Sarkozy and other European leaders are working on a less elegant and more phased way to create a pool of bailout money that is large enough to convince the markets there is little chance of a default on Italian and Spanish bonds, which should drive down rates to sustainable levels, European and American officials say. 
 
 Mrs. Merkel says it is time to get the euro’s fundamentals right. She is insisting on treaty changes to promote more fiscal discipline, including a limit on budget deficits, with outside supervision and surveillance of national budgets before they become dangerous, and clear sanctions for countries that fail to adhere to the firmer rules. Berlin wants the new standards backed up by the European Court of Justice or perhaps the European Commission, with the power to reject budgets that break the rules and return them for revision. 
 
 She would like the treaty changes to be accepted by all 27 members of the European Union, but failing that, she said she would accept treaty changes within the euro zone, with other countries who want to join in the future, like Poland, free to commit to the tougher rules now. Many countries, and not only Britain, are opposed to institutionalizing a two- or even three-tier European Union, fearing that their interests will be sacrificed and their voices diminished. ||||| Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are as far apart as they ever were. But with five days to go until the next summit, their political standoff is part of the usual pre-summit poker game. The German chancellor and the French president always reach some agreement in the end. My main concern is they will again fudge it. 
 
 Contrary to what is being reported, Merkel is not proposing a fiscal union. She is proposing an austerity club, a stability pact on steroids. The goal is to enforce life-long austerity, with balanced budget rules enshrined in every national constitution. She also proposes automatic sanctions with a judicially administered regime of compliance. She rejects eurobonds on the grounds that they reduce pressure on fiscal discipline. 
 
 Sarkozy’s proposal could not be more different. He has said that he is not prepared to cede any sovereignty to the centre. He wants to retain the inter-governmental approach that has so abysmally failed in the past. He opposes any attempts to strengthen the European Commission, or to involve the European Court of Justice in adjudicating on breaches of the rules. While rejectingMerkel’s obsession with austerity, he is not interested in a genuine fiscal union either. He is open to a eurozone bond and to the European Central Bank having the role of lender-of-last resort. I would surmise that this is because Francewould stand to benefit from both. 
 
 Mario Draghi, meanwhile, insists politicians deliver their part of the bargain before he does. The ECB’s president has so far resisted pressure on him to provide an unlimited backstop to the system, either by backing the European bail-out fund or through a direct guarantee of long-term bond market prices. ||||| So “Merkel acts to save the euro”, as various British headline writers misleadingly put it. This action consists of proposing that the 17 eurozone states make a side-agreement – therefore not requiring a full Inter-Governmental Conference – to have a European authority scrutinise their budgets and fine them if they run big budget deficits. Crucially, this would be approved by qualified-majority voting rather than unanimity, so there would be no national veto over the sanctions. It is somehow amusing how literally every great and little issue in the European Union seems to end up in a row about qualified-majority voting. Of course, this is an example of the basic truth that politics is about power. But it is in practice pretty rare that the distinction matters much. 
 
 Now, don’t kid yourself that any of this is going to happen quickly. All 17 will have to get round a table, agree, ratify, etc. Although Merkel apparently said that it wouldn’t affect German sovereignty (I’m moving home and reliant on spotty Internet connectivity, so I don’t have her actual words to hand, so this may be wrong), I find it hard to imagine that the same little caucus of law professors as always will not demand that the Constitutional Court rule on the matter, so we’ll probably be waiting a good long time while the sages of Karlsruhe mull it over. 
 
 But speed is not really the biggest problem here. It’s a big problem – one of the underreported issues in the mainstream media is the degree to which this crisis is still about banks and the dread of a run on the banks, and few things move faster than a bank crisis. Here’s a data point – the volume of funds banks (and big industrial companies that happen to have a bank licence somewhere around, like Siemens) are holding on deposit at the European Central Bank, for fear of putting them anywhere else, is spiking. But it’s not the only problem with this proposal. The problem with this proposal is that it is simply irrelevant in terms of its content. 
 
 Had it been in force through the 2000s, what would have been different? It would have been much easier to sanction the decade’s violators of the Stability & Growth Pact – Germany and France. Of course they got sanctioned anyway, but perhaps they would have had to pay a fine. Let’s be charitable for a moment and assume that this would indeed have caused them to run a lower public sector deficit. This would have changed what, precisely? Had it depressed internal demand in Germany, all other things being equal, it would have caused Germany to increase its trade surplus. A bigger trade surplus implies a bigger deficit elsewhere, and it also implies that German and French banks would have lent the private sector “elsewhere” the money they needed to buy the additional exports. An additional problem might have been that, had German bonds been in shorter supply, investors would have sought other AAA-rated assets and piled up even more bubbly mortgage-backed securities, which the banks would have been delighted to sell them. 
 
 Perhaps lower deficits in Germany or France would have inspired German and French consumers to spend via the magic of Ricardian equivalence, but this does feel awfully like assuming a pony. You can argue about that. 
 
 But one thing this proposal would categorically not have done is to stop Italy or Spain or Ireland running up more public debt. Public debt fell in these countries from 1995 to 2007. Even Portugal and Greece didn’t exactly explode. Ireland would still have a budget surplus if it hadn’t massacred itself to save the banks (in part because the ECB wouldn’t help). Greece, well, perhaps, but it seems to be clear that just yelling at the Greeks is insufficient to fix Greece’s problems. 
 
 We’ve had a massive asset price bubble, funded by an explosion of private debt, largely borrowed from a few huge banks that grew to enormous size processing the international settlements required by the huge intra-eurozone trade imbalance. But this proposal says nothing about asset prices, private debts, banks, or trade, and very little about growth. Instead, if we were to try to reverse engineer this proposal’s purpose from its design, we would have to conclude that the source of the eurozone crisis is that the German Government has too much debt. 
 
 And I think we can all agree that, whatever explanation you prefer for the crisis, that isn’t it. 
 
 There are other problems, too. The combination of “Durchgriffsrechte” – rights of direct intervention – with no eurobonds has toxic politics, as it gives whoever will “durchgreifen” power without giving them any responsibility, and also doesn’t give the other eurozone states any benefit (like lower interest rates) in exchange for this concession. It seems hard to imagine why anyone would accept this.
– With the survival of the eurozone at stake, European leaders are aiming to complete a plan this week that will transform the region and save the euro, reports the New York Times. Despite major differences that remain between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, a four-point deal is taking shape, including increased fiscal discipline for eurozone countries to be added to European treaties; an increase of the European Financial Stability Facility to two or three times its current size; more money to the IMF to increase the bailout fund; and relaxing regulations to enable the European Central Bank in the short run to continue aggressively supporting Italian and Spanish bonds. It's a huge and ambitious plan—and completely irrelevant to the eurozone's problems, says Alex Harrowell at A Fistful of Euros, noting that two of the biggest violators of the eurozone's fiscal rules for the past decade were Germany and France. With Germany obsessing about austerity and French concerned with sovereignty, "I doubt they have ever understood the economic and financial dynamics behind the crisis," writes Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times. Propping up the ECB in the short run and moving toward eurobonds in the long run—along with a true fiscal union—is the only hope of saving the euro. "What I fear is a fudge," says Munchau, calling temporary liquidity without bigger changes "a compromise, but no solution."