The euro celebrates its 10th anniversary as a hard currency on 1 January, but that anniversary will be celebrated under some very dark clouds indeed.

EU leaders are preparing to meet next week in Brussels in what is being marketed as a sink or swim summit for the great experiment that is apparently going horribly wrong, which is the European common currency.

But isn’t it that every time the euro is in crisis; it is said to be the worst and most threatening yet? That is, perhaps, because it is. Every crisis seems to exacerbate the currency’s problems.

In February of last year we observed how the euro had fallen on hard times. Hindsight is a great thing. Just take a look at what we had written almost two years ago:

“The euro is facing its most serious crisis in its history. Greece is on the verge of a default, and it appears it will default unless the EU steps in to bail out its struggling economy. The default of just one of the eurozone’s 16 member countries will undoubtedly threaten the euro’s global credibility, a credibility Malta had long sought and achieved when it joined the currency block.

“Europe’s fragile ongoing recovery from the global recession could be reversed and investors could very well be scared away from other eurozone members, such as Malta, that are perceived to be struggling with their public finance balance sheets.

“If the Greek economy were to fail, it would be a disaster for the whole of the eurozone and indeed for the whole of the EU. The economic fortunes of all the countries using the euro are too tightly linked to contain the crisis to just one of them. And Greece may not be alone for long. Similar financing crises could soon hit Ireland, Spain and Portugal.”

If only that prophecy had not come to fruition, but even that far back the writing was very clearly on the wall and we had a European Commission that was either very reluctant or lacked the teeth to effectively address a mounting sovereign debt crisis.

It is hoped that the new six-pack economic governance package that the Commission now has at its disposal will be wielded effectively. That will remain to be seen by the middle of this month when the new punitive measures come into force, and whether the Commission will sanction countries violating budgetary discipline rules.

But in the meantime the rot continues. Greece had cooked the fiscal books for years but few questions about the state of its finances were asked in better economic times. Now the truth and its brutal consequences are being brought to bear.

Corruption and tax evasion crippled the Greek economy, millions were paid under the table, the private sector did not generate enough jobs or tax revenues, and one in four Greeks worked for the state.

It was a system designed to produce deficits, and it is also a system that should sound at least a little familiar to Malta. However, Malta has been taking strides to address these endemic problems that are seemingly shared by Mediterranean countries, but whether it will be enough to stave off what was the inevitable for other countries remains to be seen.

That is precisely why Germany and France are champing at the bit for more effective action to contain the financial crisis and to enforce those stronger rules against government overspending. And next week’s summit will kick off a process of enforcing such compliance by rewriting European Union treaties, a process that Germany’s Angela Merkel says could take years. Merkel made the statement late Friday, a day after French President Nicolas Sarkozy made the same argument.

If that is done, the European Central Bank could provide some more short-term assistance for the EU’s heavily indebted countries, but only provided the EU’s leaders band together on Friday and emerge from the summit with a political agreement along the lines being suggested by Germany and France.

For Malta’s part, it has welcomed the six-pack economic governance package, as well as the Commission’s pledge to use its new fiscal powers. What Malta may think of other German and French plans for a more federalised Europe is another matter altogether, but it is one that could very well surface at next week’s summit, and it would be interesting to gauge the favour such soundings enjoy from the rest of the EU, including Malta.