In hammering out an eleventh-hour plan to save their financial systems fromcollapse, European Union leaders have demonstrated once again that it often takes a full-blown crisis to bring the best out of their 50-year-old bloc.

While the plan may not ensure a rapid return to stability on financial markets and has come too late to prevent a recession in many EU countries, it appears to mark a turning point in Europe's conceptual approach to the crisis.

Until Sunday's eurozone summit in Paris, heads of government from the 15 countries sharing the euro had never held a formal meeting since the currency's launch in January 1999.

Now some politicians and diplomats are hailing the summit, and the guidelines it produced for rescuing Europe's banks, as a potential starting point for an era of European integration.

"Every past crisis has been a learning experience on the European level," Ursula Plassnik, Austria's foreign minister, said on Monday at a foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg.

"Over the past few days we've developed a common European consciousness in the financial crisis that we will now translate into action," she told reporters at an EU foreign ministers' meeting.

It is no small irony that one driving force behind the measures to protect private sector financial institutions and revive interbank lending was Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.

The UK has never shown much enthusiasm for joining the eurozone and, in the early months of Mr Brown's premiership last year, was seen on the European continent as more detached from the EU than at any time since the era of Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s.

However, the need for a strong united response was brought home to all EU leaders by the disastrous impression made by the beggar-thy-neighbour national policies adopted when the storm first hit Europe last month.

These included not only blanket guarantees of savers' deposits announced by Ireland, Germany and Greece but a unilateral decision in the Netherlands to nationalise the Dutch part of Fortis, a beleaguered Belgian-Dutch banking and insurance group.

Only five days earlier, Fortis had been the subject of a €11.2bn ($15.2bn, £8.75bn) rescue, devised by the governments of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

At Monday's Luxembourg meeting, diplomats compared the financial crisis and the EU's response with other seismic events, such as the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc and Germany's unification gave a decisive impulse to European monetary union, because Germany and its allies were determined to bind the newly enlarged German state fully into the new Europe.

Severe turmoil on currency markets in 1992-93 struck a blow at the EU's exchange rate mechanism, the precursor to monetary union, but this too proved to be a crisis that reinforced the will of European leaders to create the euro.

The 9/11 attacks, meanwhile, were the key factor that prompted the EU to adopt a common European arrest warrant, a big step forward in judicial co-operation. The area where EU leaders have struggled most in recent years to press ahead as one is that of reforming the bloc's institutional arrangements to take account of its enlargement from 15 countries in the mid-1990s to 27 today.

The effort began as long ago as December 2001, when the EU set up a constitutional convention on Europe's future.

But French and Dutch voters rejected a EU constitutional treaty in 2005 and Irish voters rejected a watered down version, known as the Lisbon treaty, last June. There is still no agreed solution in sight to this crisis.