Excerpt:
The leaders of the 27-member European Union met in Brussels on December 8 and 9 under pressure to deliver a decisive solution to Europe's two-year-old sovereign debt crisis.
But the high-profile summit — which was billed by many as the last chance to save the euro single currency — did little to resolve the immediate crisis at hand, namely the massive debt loads of most European countries and the spiraling costs of borrowing more money to pay off those debts.
Instead, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy (aka "Merkozy") leveraged the crisis summit to secure a "historic" commitment from all of the 17 countries that use the euro single currency (aka "eurozone countries") to transfer broad new economic and financial decision-making powers to unelected and unaccountable technocrats in Brussels, the administrative capital of the EU.