As the continent winds down in anticipation of the Christmas holidays, the pressure on the decision-makers is easing.

There has been an unexpected tranquility in the markets: Italian borrowing costs on benchmark 10-year yields dropped to 4.6 per cent last week (the lowest in two years) and continued dropping; Spain’s fell to levels last seen in April.

This has removed the urgency and maybe panic so often felt over the past months. As a result, the deadlines so often declared by the EU leaders have been allowed to slide: – settling Greece’s bailout; assisting Spain with a bond-buying programme backed by the European Central Bank; completing the first step of a eurozone “banking union”; agreeing to a new seven-year EU budget – the European leaders have deferred or avoided tough decisions. It now looks as though even next week’s Council, which should lead to concrete decisions on the banking union will be a fudge.

It is true that on the one hand, the worst has not happened: Greece has not exited from the euro, and the worst has not happened in any of the other countries at risk. Slowly, Europe is picking itself up and, in varying degrees, countries can already see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The best, of course, is Ireland which tackled the crisis head-on, took a great beating and is now almost out of the wood (although as today’s Budget Speech will say, it still needs a couple of years more to be out of the problem). Portugal is struggling hard and it’s an uphill climb but it is moving ahead, maybe will need as well a couple of years more. Spain and Italy are special cases where the problem is compounded by social infrastructures that have not made the move to modernity.

This does not mean that Europe has come through unscathed. The millions of people out of a job in Europe is at an all-time high, investment is still very low, people in all countries are suffering from lack of growth, young people especially have suddenly lost opportunities especially in their own countries and may have to migrate.

Politically, this crisis may not have led to the radicalizing such as some feared but still there has been an increase in extremist parties accompanied by xenophobic outbreaks.

One can also add there has been an increased bickering and public sniping between Europe’s leaders, such as between Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel, and a general disagreement in Europe with David Cameron as well as a growing exasperation with Spain’s Mariano Rajoy.

There is so much to do and so little is being done. Yet if nothing serious and structured is done, the euro will plunge back into the crisis from which it has risen at such a great cost.

One gets the impression that there is no common agreement on what caused the crisis, what needs to be done, what needs to be changed, and the way forward. Many disagreements are not just on secondary issues but on fundamentals. The UK issue, for instance, is a very radical and fundamental issue and needs to be solved either way: Britain is important for Europe but so too Europe is important for Britain.

Europe has seen this crisis split it up, or rather widen the already existing splits within it. Europe has become a galaxy of countries joined at the hip but at the same time engaged in a variable pattern and alignments.

So the best bet is that Europe will struggle on, will limp ahead, will continue to act as if in a haze. Until the next time the markets plunge the entire continent back into the crisis.