Youth unemployment is particularly high, raising the possibility of long-lasting damage to the Continent’s economic potential as young people are idle at a time when they would normally be developing key skills. Nationalist and populist political movements on both the left and the right, drawing strength from economic dislocation, are undermining support for European unity.

Image Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. Credit... Bernd Von Jutrczenka/European Pressphoto Agency

“The belief that the euro can be used to bring about the economic ‘re-education’ of Europe’s south will prove a dangerous fallacy — and not just in Greece,” Joschka Fischer, a left-leaning former German foreign minister, wrote this week.

The rising influence of the Berlin consensus despite these trends has much to do with the political backlash in Europe to the Greek government under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his radical-left Syriza party. Mr. Tsipras’s heated arguments against austerity, however much they reflected the views of many economists, were undermined at least in part by his government’s inconsistent policies and frontal challenges to German leadership.

But previous efforts by the current governments of France and Italy to encourage more flexibility in imposing austerity have also made little headway.

Like Greece, they have run up against a combination of subtle German diplomacy by its seasoned center-right leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble; German credibility and power derived from a strong domestic economy; and, perhaps most important, domestic political considerations in countries across Europe that are encouraging their leaders to express greater devotion to the German way of doing things.

That philosophy, as applied since the financial crisis began upending global economies in 2008, transcends typical lines of right versus left (one of the chief engineers of the latest Greek bailout, which demands new austerity and major reforms, was the Dutch finance minister, who is from his country’s Labour Party). And it is not simply a matter of creditor versus debtor (Portugal, among other debtor countries that signed on, insisted Greece make the same difficult reforms it has).

In the end, in a crucial debate that set up Europe’s position against Greece in negotiations the week of July 12, 15 nations embraced the hard-line position with only three, France, Italy and Cyprus, isolated as preferring a more generous approach open to debt forgiveness.