The European Union’s decision to call its members together in two emergency summits aimed at strengthening defences against the mutating virus of protectionism is, in principle, a good idea – so long as it crystallises into a collective realisation of what is at stake and why.

Europe’s response to this emergency has been ragged, perhaps unsurprisingly given the global impersonality and seemingly fathomless depths of the crisis. But that is no excuse for beggar-thy-neighbour policies and a subsidies war – typified by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s outrageous call for French carmakers to “repatriate” their production from east European assembly plants to France.