But for Germany this treaty to toughen fiscal rules is only the start of integration.
One solution is to set fiscal rules, but it has been discredited of late.
No, says Mr Brown, the government is still on course to meet his two fiscal rules.
Governments need to bind themselves to credible fiscal rules that provide incentives for good behaviour.
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Whether electorates will be quite so quick to shackle themselves to Germanic fiscal rules is another matter.
It also gave warning that tax rises were needed for the government to meet its fiscal rules.
Stricter fiscal rules in the euro zone are a precondition for any strengthening of the firewall, Germany insists.
It points out that confidence in Scottish finances will require clear fiscal rules on constraining deficit and debt.
Its incorrigible breaches of the euro area's fiscal rules have already upset the European Commission and neighbouring euro members.
He's just halved the number of fiscal rules that he is going to abide by - from two to one.
Last week, 26 of the 27 members of the European Union backed new fiscal rules, with only the UK abstaining.
Berlin said on Wednesday that it would balance its budget in 2015, a year earlier than required under its fiscal rules.
And the flouting of fiscal rules was not the only, or even the main, cause of the problem in the first place.
The chancellor insists that the fiscal rules had been met in the last economic cycle, which the Treasury believes ended in 2006-07.
Any new fiscal rules need to allow for tax and labor-policy competition.
Before the crisis Spain was well within the euro zone's fiscal rules.
Yet the dangers were for the most part ignored, or reckoned to be manageable through fiscal rules and the promise of economic convergence.
Germany and France are pushing for changes to the EU treaty, saying stricter fiscal rules should be made part of basic EU law.
These buoyant revenues have allowed the finance minister to meet (give or take) the fiscal rules his government wrote for itself in 2004.
On Monday, Mr Brown gave a coded warning in his Conference speech that there would be "no playing politics to bypass our fiscal rules".
But with the commission's fiscal rules now bent out of shape, the onus to find an answer will fall more squarely on Mr Trichet.
On paper, Europe has never experienced a shortage of fiscal rules.
In return for issuing euro bonds or perhaps granting countries access to ECB bond purchases, Germany would require those nations to live by German-approved fiscal rules.
Seen from Brussels, Italy is increasingly the big test of the new (and weaker) stability pact, which is supposed to set fiscal rules for euro members.
"If this government fails to deal with the deficit in this parliament we will deal with it in the next, " he said, promising "disciplined" new fiscal rules.
And in any case, it has conditions of its own: the euro zone must have a proper means of enforcing fiscal rules and a better crisis-management system.
Euro-area fiscal rules could also allow governments to spend more in bad times as long as they save more in good times, said Harvard University economist Jeffrey Frankel.
It does not want to be bound by the EU's fiscal rules, but nor does it want a more tightly integrated euro zone leading to a two-speed Europe.
Of course, it is hard to know whether fiscal rules stiffen finance ministers' spines or whether they are adopted by governments that already have the necessary political will.
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We think they will follow through on stricter fiscal rules.
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