Germany, under Angela Merkel, emerges as the pre-eminent power in Europe, imposing a decade of austerity. Photograph: Koen Van Weel/EPA
As a clear damp dawn rose over Brussels on Friday morning, the tired and tetchy leaders of Europe emerged, bleary-eyed from nine hours of night-time sparring over how to rescue the single currency and indeed the entire European project.
Brave faces were put on, bluffs called, counter-bluffs revealed, vetoes wielded. Histrionics from France's Nicolas Sarkozy, poker-faced calm from Germany's Angela Merkel, David Cameron gambling the UK's place in Europe by opting to battle for Britain rather than helping to save the euro. When the dust settles, Friday 9 December may be seen as a watershed, the beginning of the end for Britain in Europe. But more than that – the emergence for the first time of a cold new Europe in which Germany is the undisputed, pre-eminent power imposing a decade of austerity on the eurozone as the price for its propping up the currency.
The prospect is of a joyless union of penalties, punishments, disciplines and seething resentments, with the centrist elites who run the EU increasingly under siege from anti-EU populists on the right and left everywhere in Europe.
"For the first time in the history of the EU, the Germans are now in charge. But they are also more isolated than before," said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform thinktank. "The British are certainly more marginal than before. Their influence has never been lower in my lifetime."
Whether or not the summit has saved the euro remains, of course, to be seen. At a single stroke, however, it has transformed Britain's place in Europe. With the fate of the currency at stake in the EU's worst crisis, Cameron opted for a fight and lost, placing the interests of the City of London before the European priority. Battling for Britain and wielding my veto in the Great British national interest, Cameron averred. There are senior UK officials who believe the prime minister betrayed the British national interest by picking the wrong fight at the wrong time, losing, and forfeiting a seat at the table that will determine the future shape of the EU.
"Cameron has miscalculated and performed rather badly. He didn't do well," said a senior EU official. If the main summit narrative was UK v EU, the frictions, anxieties and animosities generated by Germany's new ascendancy, however, extend much more broadly, enveloping France, Spain, Italy, Greece and others. Cameron went to Brussels saddled with backbench taunts of being the new Neville Chamberlain. The nasty references to the 1938 appeasement of Hitler, however, are not only heard on the Tory backbenches and in the Europhobic tabloids in Britain.
Nicolas Sarkozy, too, is contending with attacks from the right and the left that he has capitulated to Berlin and is being compared with the Frenchman who was with Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 – Édouard Daladier. In Greece, Italy and Spain the talkshows and newspapers are bristling with anti-German grudges, regularly bringing up the second world war, the Nazis, the alleged "Fourth Reich".
And in Germany itself, where its leaders are ambivalent about their new power and feel willfully misunderstood, columnists are calculating how much it is costing the country to bail out the eurozone's feckless states and comparing the figures to the colossal reparations it was forced to pay after the first world war, triggering the backlash which paved the way for Hitler. "We are going to have to put up with a bit of Germanophobia," wrote Jakob Augstein in Der Spiegel this week. "Europe has returned to the stereotypes of the postwar years. The ugly German is back … it would be better for Germany to get things wrong together with its partners than to insist on being right alone..."
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