When the European Central Bank decided to host a conference on Friday on the “lessons and challenges” of 10 years of the euro, it could hardly imagine the scale of the current challenge facing the 15-country eurozone.

As economists and academics gathered at Frankfurt’s InterContinental hotel, official data confirmed that the region had fallen into its first recession. The global slowdown and changing financial landscape, “may well turn out to be a litmus test for the functioning of the economic and monetary union, both in economic and institutional terms,” admitted Jürgen Stark, an ECB executive board member.