The post-war European settlement could have been described as the desire to keep Germany down, France up and the UK in. It looks now as if we are failing on all three fronts, but Germany’s economic rise gets little attention. The Greek economic problem, and the wider woes in other parts of the eurozone, might have as much to do with structural flaws in the eurozone which play to Germany’s advantage, as with over-indulgent policies in the southern eurozone states. The European Monetary Union was designed to reduce economic imbalances within the eurozone; it has done the reverse. From the introduction of the euro in 1999 up to 2011, Germany’s cumulative trade surplus with the rest of the EU was more than US$1 trillion (£0.65 trillion). Between 1997 and 2007, its trad