Press

Taking a step back, Philip Whyte at the Centre for European Reform argues that the initial June report from the gang of four "marked an important departure, because its focus shifted to correcting the eurozone's architectural flaws rather than the behaviour of its members."

"It would involve countries handing over to an unelected appointed figures the right to veto their budgets, so in terms of the implications for democratic accountability it's certainly very radical," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London.

Charles Grant: The EU merits the peace prize. Its role in history is unique and positive, and much more important than the inability of the current bunch of leaders to resolve the eurozone's travails. One only has to travel to Asia to understand the EU's value.

Charles Grant director of the CER, initially laughed off the award but then decided it was a significant moment."My first reaction was to think it was a joke," he said. "But the more I thought about it the more I realised that these Nobel guys were seeing the broad sweep of history that some of us."

"The German government, compared to the French and the British governments, is always unco-ordinated," said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform.

Hugo Brady of the CER has conducted a major study of the block opt-out. He argues that while exercising the block opt-out en masse will boost Cameron's eurosceptic credentials, it could leave Britain badly exposed in terms of security, while further alienating key allies. "His claims to British legal exceptionalism are unlikely to convince other EU countries that the block opt-out is anything other than a shallow political manoeuvre," says Brady.

"This highlights the real challenges for Europeans in their attempt to create an integrated defence industry and market," said Clara Marina O’Donnell, a research fellow with the CER think tank. "We had three countries with three different approaches to defence that were impossible to reconcile."

"It is hard to be optimistic about a region as heavily indebted as Europe, or Western Europe, when the region's economy is [heading] into a very deep slump," said Simon Tilford, of the CER. "So any sort of optimism we see at the moment is likely to prove very short lived."