Seeing in Crisis the Last Best Chance to Unite Europe

"We carry not only responsibility for ourselves," Wolfgang Schäuble said. "We are also responsible for the development of the global economy."

WHERE the world finds only chaos and impending disaster in the European debt crisis, Wolfgang Schäuble sees the long-awaited urgency to finish the half-complete job of unifying Europe. As Germany’s finance minister and a close confidant of Chancellor Angela Merkel, he is in a uniquely powerful position to shape the outcome.

Yet it is something of a miracle that Mr. Schäuble is in the German government at all. His health has been an issue since Oct. 12, 1990, the day a would-be assassin shot him, paralyzing his legs and confining him to a wheelchair from that point forward.

His troubles did not end there, however. As recently as May 2010, on his way to Brussels for an emergency meeting of European Union finance ministers, Mr. Schäuble (pronounced SHOY-bluh) found himself in the intensive care unit of a Belgian hospital, battling complications from an earlier operation.

At that point, with the German news media speculating about his resignation, and even his chances of survival, he phoned Mrs. Merkel to discuss his future.

AS the early sunset of a Berlin autumn evening darkened his office, Mr. Schäuble, 69, recalled asking Mrs. Merkel if he could have until the end of the week to see whether he could regain enough strength to return to work. “She said she found that to be the wrong question entirely. I should take the time I needed to get better,” Mr. Schäuble said. “She said she needed me and she wanted me. End of discussion.”

It proved to be a wise decision. Mr. Schäuble’s experience has been crucial to Mrs. Merkel as she has tried to hold the line between European partners demanding Germany’s financial assistance and angry voters who do not want to pay off the debts of their profligate southern neighbors. And political analysts say Mr. Schäuble was indispensable in holding together the conservative bloc in the vote over expanding the European rescue fund, the bailout fund meant to help heavily indebted euro-zone nations like Greece, which had evolved into a de facto vote of confidence for Mrs. Merkel’s crisis management.

Mr. Schäuble recalled the palpable fear at a meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers in Washington in September, held the week before the vote on the rescue fund was scheduled. “You should have felt it,” he said he told his party’s parliamentary group upon his return. “We carry not only responsibility for ourselves. We are also responsible for the development of the global economy.”

Mr. Schäuble, his hair white and a little sparse, the hint of gravel in his voice, is the oldest member of Mrs. Merkel’s cabinet, the last born before the end of World War II and a throwback to pro-European conservatives like Helmut Kohl, under whom he was chief of staff. A campaign finance scandal forced him to step aside in 2000 as chairman of the Christian Democratic Union in favor of the young East German politician Angela Merkel, whom he had put forward as the party’s general secretary less than two years earlier.

NOW, for the second time in his career, Mr. Schäuble finds himself loyally serving a chancellor. He was a whiz at math as a boy but studied law, eventually earning a doctorate. He was just 30 when he entered the Bundestag, with an eye fixed on the chancellery.

But over the years, with the shooting, the scandal and Mr. Kohl’s lengthy tenure — some say his refusal to give way to his presumed successor — Mr. Schäuble evolved from an ambitious young politician to an elder statesman beyond worrying about his political future. “If it puts him in a bad light, but it’s good for Germany, he’ll do it,” said Fred B. Irwin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany, who has known Mr. Schäuble for 25 years.

That, observers say, has given him the freedom to pursue an agenda even more pro-Europe than Mrs. Merkel’s. “Under Merkel he’s developed an extremely independent role,” said Ulrich Deupmann, author of a biography of Mr. Schäuble. Or as the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper put it this year: “The finance minister is his own chancellor.”

At the Christian Democrats’ annual party congress this week in Leipzig, Mr. Schäuble earned the loudest and most spontaneous applause. “When Schäuble speaks, everyone hangs on every word,” said Michael Büge, a delegate from Berlin.

His electoral district in Baden-Württemberg ends at the French border, and he enjoys close ties with Christine Lagarde, the Frenchwoman in charge of the International Monetary Fund, and President Nicolas Sarkozy. That is a significant advantage, in that Europe in the postwar era has moved forward only when France and Germany could find common ground.

The latest debate in Europe is whether a tightening of cooperation between the euro-zone countries will divide the European Union further between those member countries that use the euro and those that do not. Mr. Schäuble already had proposed what is known as a “two-speed Europe,” in a paper in 1994.

“That once again illustrates the terrible fact that while I’m not as old as Helmut Schmidt, I’m not exactly the youngest either,” Mr. Schäuble said, referring to the Social Democrat who became chancellor in 1974. Now 92, Mr. Schmidt plays the public role of national conscience and eminence.

Mr. Schäuble mocks any references to himself as “the last European” or a bridge between generations or countries, rejecting anything that smacks of memorialization when he is still hard at work.

He led the negotiations on reunification on behalf of the West German government, a defining moment of his career. Now, Mr. Schäuble’s European legacy will be written in the coming months — as either one of the key architects of the new Europe or the man who watched a project he has worked on for decades fall apart. Few are as prepared as Mr. Schäuble to handle the sharp swings of fate.

MR. SCHÄUBLE said the German government would propose treaty changes at the summit of European leaders in Brussels on Dec. 9 that would move Europe closer to the centralized fiscal government that the currency zone has lacked. The ultimate goal, Mr. Schäuble says, is a political union with a European president directly elected by the people.

“What we’re now doing with the fiscal union, what I’m describing here, is a short-term step for the currency,” Mr. Schäuble said. “In a larger context, naturally we need a political union.”

Critics say the spending cuts German leaders have demanded from other countries are hurting growth across the Continent, in the process making debts only harder to repay. And his proposals to give the European Commission far-reaching powers to enforce budgetary discipline have been likened by skeptics in Britain to an invasive new “super state.” Even some euro supporters fear that Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Schäuble are talking about long-term changes while panicked investors and practiced speculators are tearing the euro to pieces right now.

“There is a limited transition period where we have to manage the nervousness on the markets,” Mr. Schäuble said. “If it is clear that by the end of 2012 or the middle of 2013 that we have all the ingredients for new, strengthened and deepened political structures together, I think that will work.”

He sees the turmoil as not an obstacle but a necessity. “We can only achieve a political union if we have a crisis,” Mr. Schäuble said.