France has launched a feverish campaign to shore up the euro before the next global downturn, warning that monetary union is not strong enough to withstand another crisis and faces disintegration without fiscal union.

Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, said there are just weeks left for Germany and the Dutch-led "Hanseatic League" to grasp the nettle on long-delayed reforms. “Either we get a eurozone budget or there will eventually be no euro at all,” he said.

“If there was new financial and economic crisis tomorrow, the eurozone could not respond. It is really urgent that we build-up the eurozone’s defences. We have been talking for too long,” he told the Handelsblatt.

Time is running out before the EU’s make-or-break summit on the future of the euro next month. The global expansion is looking tired and fragile.

Mr Le Maire said Europe’s leaders had failed to learned the lessons of 2008 and the 2012 debt crisis. They had not completed the banking union, or broken the "bank-sovereign doom loop" with full help from the bail-out fund (ESM).

Nor had they completed the capital markets union, or established a fiscal entity to bind EU economies closer together. “I am not being pessimistic, I am facing reality,” he said.