They are the institutions of one kind or another entrusted with the hard-earned savings of hundreds of millions of people.
It looks as if the latest summit will at last impart some content to the notion of fiscal integration or fiscal union, outlining the rules and vetting processes member states will have to comply with in respect of their future budgets and the penalties for non-compliance.
With any luck this will address the immediate, acute problem, which is the risk of another global financial crisis in which markets freeze and a credit crunch triggers a worldwide recession.
But it will not deal with the chronic, structural problem which has given rise to the acute one. That problem, it fundamentally misdiagnoses.
The benefit of the prospect of a tougher fiscal regime is that it ought to prompt the European Central Bank to get over its Teutonic DNA and act to stabilise the situation.
The ECB needs to be willing, and be seen to be willing, to expand its balance sheet by whatever extent is necessary to bring the bond yields of troubled eurozone member states down to supportable levels.
It needs to act as a lender of last resort, bridging the confidence gap between investors with money to lend and the governments that need it.
Both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, for much less pressing reasons, have bought large quantities of their governments' bonds to bring yields down.
The new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, has signalled that moves towards greater fiscal discipline need to, and by implication would, precede similar action by the ECB.
It does not follow, however, that a new regime to deliver fiscal convergence within the euro zone and replace the ineffectual Maastricht Treaty would do what French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed on Monday and "make sure that the imbalances that led to the situation in the eurozone today cannot happen again".
The prevailing view, held with most conviction in Berlin but apparently also shared by many in the markets, is that because this is a sovereign debt crisis, it must have arisen from fiscal laxity over many years on the part of the governments now in trouble.
Enforce limits on the size of the deficits they are allowed to run and a recurrence is prevented. Simple.
Unfortunately the evidence does not support this view (except in the case of Greece).
The other four countries in trouble (so far) had either a very good or a pretty good fiscal record over the eight years between the launch of the euro and the global financial crisis, when everybody's fiscal numbers deteriorated sharply, including New Zealand's.
Maastricht required governments to keep their budget deficits below 3 per cent of gross domestic product.
From 2000 to 2007 inclusive the Irish Government ran surpluses every year but one and was in the black by an average of 1.4 per cent of GDP over the eight years.
Spain recorded four deficits within the eight years, all of them less than 1 per cent of GDP. On average it had a surplus of 0.3 per cent of GDP.
Portugal had an average deficit of 1.3 per cent of GDP.
Even Italy, which strayed across the 3 per cent line five times, averaged a deficit of 2.9 per cent over the eight years.
Its sky-high debt to GDP ratio (120 per cent) is largely a legacy from decades before the euro, compounded by the fact that its economy has recorded little growth over the past 10 years.
These countries are not in trouble because they failed to abide by the rules intended to deliver fiscal convergence among eurozone states.
Rather, the problem is monetary union itself.
Its one-size-fits-all character delivered the weaker members of the group interest rates that were too low, and exchanges rates that were too high, for their national circumstances.
For a while this feels good.
But eventually asset bubbles messily burst, as in Ireland and Spain. Private sector debt turns into public debt when financial stability is threatened.
Similarly a fundamental lack of competitiveness is only exacerbated by an exchange rate that is too strong.
What the troubled economies of the eurozone have in common is not a record of fiscal indiscipline but large current account deficits.
Correcting that requires structural reforms that are difficult at the best of times and even more painful when accompanied by severe fiscal contraction and no ability to lubricate the process of adjustment by reducing either the external or internal value of the currency.
Too rapid a fiscal correction can be counterproductive.
What matters is the ratio of debt to GDP, not just the debt in isolation.
If measures taken to rein in debt squeeze the life out of the economy, the ratio will not improve and may deteriorate.
Consigning whole countries to the equivalent of a Dickensian debtors' prison, where squalid and brutal incarceration does nothing for the debtor's ability to pay, would be idiotic.
If premature monetary union has been bad for the weaker members, it has been good for the stronger ones, led of course by Germany.
It has enjoyed in recent years large current account surpluses, testimony not only to superior efficiency but to an exchange rate almost certainly weaker than the Deutschmark would have been.
It seems reluctant to acknowledge this, preferring a moralistic stance which ignores the fact that there are two sides to these imbalances.
Feckless borrowers in the south required reckless lenders in the north. Germany's large trade surpluses required trade deficits elsewhere.
Monetary union within a nation state requires taxpayers' money to flow from richer to poorer regions and workers to move in the opposite direction.
Both of these mechanisms are limited in Europe's case.
The European Union's budget, and transfer payments out of it, are tiny in comparison with those of the member states. And the mobility of labour may be limited to some degree by differences of language.
What the crisis has exposed is the tension at the heart of the grand European project itself.
They want the benefits of a single market and a single currency.
But they also want to be a voluntary association of 27, or in the case of the euro area 17, sovereign democratic states, with national parliaments whose fundamental prerogative it is to decide how much their people are taxed and how those taxes are spent.
How much of that sovereignty they are prepared to cede, now that the euro faces an existential crisis, is the question.
