EU leaders will be converging in Brussels today for what is set to be a long and painful EU Council summit which could determine the future of not only the eurozone and the shared currency, but also of the bloc itself.

The summit will likely be the first battle of wits between Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s new socialist PM Francois Hollande. France’s stance is one of protection of sovereign authority and of increasing public expenditure to lift the eurozone out of recession. Germany’s stance is very different and Mrs Merkel continues to push for more political and fiscal integration.

There is even talk of the summit dragging into Sunday, as Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti has suggested. This newspaper has long said that EU summits were degenerating into meetings where success was measured by the actual fact of consensus being reached, rather than the actual agreement struck. What has happened time and time again is that summit outcomes were extremely watered down ‘solutions’ that ‘pleased’ all nations, but helped none. In other words, the agreements reached could never be effective because of all the procrastination and feeble measures.

This time though, it has to be different. Mr Monti said he would be willing to stay on till Sunday, but only if a workable solution for Europe and the euro is found.

Paris and Berlin are, metaphorically speaking, a million miles apart. Many eurozone nations are calling for a ‘shared debt’ solution – but Mrs Merkel is reported to have said that she was vehemently opposed to the idea and would not consider the idea of jointly guaranteed eurozone debt for “as long as I live” at a closed meeting with her coalition partners on Tuesday. The eurozone does depend on the financial might of the German economy, but one cannot expect the country to bail everyone out, every time. Malta should also resist this notion – if the euro were to be guaranteed by joint debt – it would mean that all our fiscal prudence would go out the window.

It is finally crunch time. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said: “We must articulate the vision of where Europe must go, and a concrete path for how to get there but whether the urgency of this is fully understood by all the capitals of the EU is not known“.

Many believe that without a Franco-German accord, the prospects of a damaging summit in Brussels are high. Berlin’s angst is that Europe can only be saved and a successful Europe re-established if the two core countries are in harness, that it cannot bear the burden alone, and that if the Franco-German dynamic dissipates, the German economy will be among the biggest victims of failure. Analysts also say that the cautious hope is that Hollande will turn out or be forced to be France’s Gerhard Schröder, the ex-German chancellor, who like him was a social democrat. Only a decade ago, Schröder executed the economic, welfare, and structural reforms that put Germany in its current strong shape.

The blueprint unveiled on Tuesday calls for a eurozone political federation to be built over a decade entailing four stages. The details are thin and are to be fleshed out by the end of the year by the heads of four of the main European institutions.

To be realised, the “political union” would require a major legal overhaul, reopening EU treaties, endless quarrels, probably a new German constitution and perhaps a referendum in Britain and its departure from the EU. It is literally now or never, for Europe.