This means, in simple terms, that Merkel has presided over a substantial deepening of E.U. economic integration. With the measures she has taken to remedy the crisis now firmly in place, the European Union has integrated faster and more substantially than in any previous five-year period. True, most of this has not been wholly voluntarily. Much of it was dictated by the crisis. But in the end, it was largely Merkel who designed or enabled these great integrationist leaps forward.

Merkel’s third decision is perhaps the most fateful one. The German chancellor has determined that she favors a politically less integrated Europe after the crisis. In August, she announced in a radio interview that now was the time to think about giving some powers back from Brussels to the member states.

She did not go into specifics, but added that Europe, from now on, would not necessarily require more common policies with decisions made by the Brussels-based institutions. Improved governance could be achieved through better coordination among member states.

This victory for Merkel’s long-standing intergovernmental instincts over an age-old German pro-integration tradition is nothing less than revolutionary, particularly when compared with the ideology of Helmut Kohl, under whose tutelage she entered the political stage. Perhaps it is meant to counterbalance the enormous push toward closer economic integration. But it is clear that, again, Merkel has allied herself with the majority of Germans who think that Europe’s economic side is great, but that its political side is increasingly sinister.

Merkel’s third decision is risky. First of all, it rests on the flawed assumption that economic and political integration can be separated from each other, when the basic lesson of the euro crisis is that you can’t have one without the other.

Second, it fatefully ties her to the politically weakened British prime minister, David Cameron, who shares her vision of “repatriating” many government functions and favoring intergovernmental deal-making over the E.U.’s classic community method, but whose inability to control his own party is causing him existential problems at home.

Third, Merkel’s decision rips the very engine out of the entire integration idea: that Germany, Europe’s historically problematic core country, underwrites the ever-fragile idea of European politics transcending the merely national.