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It is an awkward moment: Chancellor Angela Merkel, after letting the continent’s crisis slide into a debt emergency that is threatening the viability of Spain, Greece and Italy, is now demanding “more Europe” as the alternative – more economic and political union, to prevent a future collapse.

But she is facing a generation gap that is threatening her ability to act, as the generation of Germans who came of age after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 – and long after the struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past had been resolved – no longer see the continent’s unity as a national obligation.