Suzi Compton argues we still need the European Union, bureacrats, warts and all.

The first fortnight of 2012 proved something of a lull in the Eurozone saga. Daily despair was suspended, our (wo)men in Paris and Brussels took a well-deserved holiday and the furrowed Merkozy brow was abandoned by the paparazzi in favour of the stricken cruise-ship Costa Concordia.

Like all good crises, however, the Eurozone’s hasn’t run its course just yet. Debt-rating agency Standard & Poor has announced a flurry of downgrades, and Greek re-structuring talks appear to have stalled. The Economist suggests there are signs of a continent-wide recession.

Technocrats remain in both Italy and Greece: Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos run their respective countries with an utter absence of democratic mandate. In both, resentment of the German and IMF-led mantra of austerity is growing as living standards fall.

On the home front, David Cameron delighted his Eurosceptics (and the French UK-sceptics) by leaving the bargaining table in December, but is now a mere spectator as the Eurozone attempts to put its shambolic house in order.

So, the great European project is tottering. The pretty notes of the single currency could soon be replaced in our pockets by the lira, drachma or franc when we head over the channel. More than that, the fault lines in the EU are not merely monetary, and a return to individual sovereignty is not as inconceivable as it was five years ago.

Europe’s great problem is a lack of a crystallised, mutually-agreed purpose. Variously an apolitical trading zone, a shaky construct of economics and politics, and a Western model of socio-political ideas about governance and human rights absorbing and reforming governments further East, the EU needs to work out what it is trying to do.

Nonetheless, it has provided to date one of the great examples of worldwide co-operation. For every Brussels directive, there is a new community building project somewhere stamped with a ring of golden stars on a blue plaque announcing European funding.

The Common Agricultural Policy has been vilified, but is also devilishly hard to get right, and bureaucrats, experts and politicians across Europe are still trying. Europe leads the world environmentally (although that isn’t too hard), and EU social legislation, on everything from minority rights to maternity and paternity leave and consumer protection, has laid the groundwork for a modern tolerant Europe. Ad infinitum, we are reminded that European countries were almost constantly at war until the European communities were started.

More than that, the facilitation of movement across borders has led to an unrivalled concoction of cultures, languages and nationalities. The multi-national UK is more closely tied now than at any point previously to countries right across the continent. And why not? Historically-designated borders mean little on the individual scale to those with widespread families and friendship groups, and as a soon-to-be graduate, I am glad of my ability to hop the channel and settle (nearly) anywhere in Europe.

Amid the current woe, then, it is necessary to retain a measure of calm. Indeed, Europeans not in government or in the business of filling column inches appear to be doing this quite well. A December poll by YouGov found that the majority of respondents in France, Germany and Denmark still expect the Euro to exist in 10 years time, as well as for the UK to still be an EU member.

I hope that their predictions hold true. Harold Macmillan, who signed us up to the EEC in 1973, wrote later in that decade that “the countries of Europe, none of them anything but second-rate powers by themselves, can, if they get together, be a power in the world, an economic power, a power in foreign policy, a power in defence equal to either of the superpowers. Over 30 years later, governments and citizens alike would do well to remember that.