A week ago, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel found themselves strolling together through the cobble-stoned streets of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, a tiny village in the northeast of France, where they were attending a war-memorial ceremony.
The town is known as a place where French leaders, from the time of Charles de Gaulle, have gone to escape the world and restore their energy. There was much retreating and restoring to be done last Saturday: The previous day, their finance ministers had rushed home early from a Washington crisis meeting after stock markets had crashed dramatically and expensive national schemes to restore the credit system had failed.
None of the patchwork of plans appeared to work and the world economy was threatening to seize up. A few hours earlier, the head of the International Monetary Fund — a Frenchman — had declared that the world financial system was "on the brink of systemic meltdown." Both leaders had been on the phone with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and they had agreed to follow his plan for governments to purchase major stakes in their countries' failing banks, at huge expense. With that done, anything seemed possible.
It was during their stroll, and over lunch afterward, that these two often-feuding leaders arrived at another conclusion: Nothing would be truly fixed, they believed, until there was a new world financial system in place, a new economic watchdog supervising the world's economies.
That was a view that had been pushed strongly by Mr. Brown, in a memo that he had begun circulating among associates and leaders, and it agreed, on the surface, with something similar to what Mr. Sarkozy had been saying for weeks: That this was an unprecedented global crisis, beyond the scope or powers of any national government.
The next step, they agreed, would have to involve the whole world, and would require rewriting the rulebook of global capitalism.
With that lunch, Europe had reached a consensus, at least superficially, on a solution that had not been attempted in 64 years: a major global meeting that would attempt to redesign the world-finance system. It was an acknowledgment, at a high level, that with the current crisis, the entire postwar economic system may have come to an end. What comes next will be a matter of heated disagreement.
By Tuesday morning, the Americans were on board, at least as far as attending the proposed meeting — expected to be held in New York shortly after the Nov. 4 presidential election. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, fresh from his re-election, said Friday he also supports holding the meeting. All the G8 industrialized nations have agreed to attend, at least on paper, and it is expected that China, Brazil and India will take part.
While there's no consensus on what the new financial order should be and there are signs of deeply divergent views, these countries appear at least willing to talk about a new international order at a meeting the three European leaders are calling Bretton Woods II, after the 1944 meeting that started it all.
"Merkel became convinced at Colombey that Brown and Sarkozy were correct that the whole postwar system of finance does not work any more, and something new will have to take its place," said a European Union official involved with the talks.
Saturday morning, the Europeans will try to take Washington a step further. Leaving early from the Montreal summit with the Canadian government, Mr. Sarkozy and European Union Commission president José Manuel Barroso will fly to Camp David to sit down with President George W. Bush and try to persuade him to support Mr. Brown's proposals to create a new set of international institutions.
