Something had to be done, and last week the E.C.B. cut interest rates. As policy decisions go, this had the distinction of being both obviously appropriate and obviously inadequate: Europe’s economy clearly needs a boost, but the E.C.B.’s action will surely make, at best, a marginal difference. Still, it was a move in the right direction.

Yet the move was hugely controversial, both inside and outside the E.C.B. And the controversy took an ominous form, at least for anyone who remembers Europe’s terrible history. For arguments over European monetary policy aren’t just a battle of ideas; increasingly, they sound like a battle of nations, too.

For example, who voted against the rate cut? Both German members of the E.C.B. board, joined by the leaders of the Dutch and Austrian central banks. Who, outside the E.C.B., was harshest in criticizing the action? German economists, who made a point not just of attacking the substance of the bank’s action but of emphasizing the nationality of Mario Draghi, the bank’s president, who is Italian. The influential German economist Hans-Werner Sinn declared that Mr. Draghi was just trying to give Italy access to low-interest loans. The chief economist of the newsweekly WirtschaftsWoche called the rate cut a “diktat from a new Banca d’Italia, based in Frankfurt.”

Such insinuations are grossly unfair to Mr. Draghi, whose efforts to contain the euro crisis have been little short of heroic. I’d go so far as to say that the euro probably would have collapsed in 2011 or 2012 without his leadership. But never mind the personalities. What’s scary here is the way this is turning into the Teutons versus the Latins, with the euro — which was supposed to bring Europe together — pulling it apart instead.

What’s going on? Some of it is national stereotyping: the German public is eternally vigilant against the prospect that those lazy southern Europeans are going to make off with its hard-earned money. But there’s also a real issue here. Germans just hate inflation, but if the E.C.B. succeeds in getting average European inflation back up to around 2 percent, it will push inflation in Germany — which is booming even as other European nations suffer Depression-like levels of unemployment — substantially higher than that, maybe to 3 percent or more.