Second, beyond necessary measures to stabilize financial markets and banking systems, central banks moved proactively to ease monetary policy to help support their economies. Initially, monetary policy was eased through the conventional means of cuts in short-term policy rates, including a coordinated rate cut in October 2008 by the Federal Reserve, the ECB, and other leading central banks.
This does not imply that Europe could become a Nation, not even as Montesquieu pretended “une Nation composée de plusieurs” (“a Nation composed of many”). Europeans are too diverse and too self-critical for that to happen. We belong nevertheless to two societies, our own and the European one as the essential background for our rationalist, universal values.