Editor’s note: After this column was published, Cameron announced he would be delaying his speech in Amsterdam due to the hostage crisis in Algeria.

Some think the prospect impossible. Many think the outcome inevitable. Most think the question irrelevant.

Will Britain pull out of the European Union or fundamentally renegotiate the terms of its EU membership?

David Cameron promises to let the British people decide between these options sometime after the next general election in 2015. That, at least, is what Cameron is preparing to say in Amsterdam on Friday , in what has been billed as the most important British pronouncement on Europe since Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech in Bruges.

That famous?speech, in which Thatcher denounced the EU’s plans to create the euro on the grounds that it would lead to a European “Super-state”, is remembered as among her most important and inspiring. But it irrevocably split the Conservative Party, and two years later, precipitated the Iron Lady’s sudden overthrow at what seemed like the height of her career. From the moment Conservative parliamentarians dismissed their greatest post-war leader, in what they themselves quickly diagnosed as a fit of collective madness, the party has been consumed by a crippling sense of guilt, especially on the subject of Europe, which shrewd political commentators have described as the Conservative Party’s Mark of Cain. This curse has manifested itself in many unexpected guises, most recently in the rise of the anti-European UK Independence Party, whose 9 percent support in opinion polls is sufficient to threaten Conservative majorities in dozens of parliamentary seats.

Will the world economy be in better shape in 2013 than 2012? The Economist asked me to debate this question with Mohamed El-Erian , chief executive officer of PIMCO, the world’s biggest bond fund. El-Erian is the author of When Markets Collide , a brilliant book that coined the term “New Normal” to describe the world’s inevitable descent into a Japanese-style era of stagnation after the 2008 financial crisis. I was delighted by the invitation because I wrote a book at about the same time, taking a very different view of the crisis ? and many of my predictions finally look like they will be realized in 2013.

In Capitalism 4.0, I argued that the crisis would create a new model of global capitalism, one based neither on the blind faith in market forces that followed the Great Inflation of the 1970s nor on the excessive government intervention inspired by the Great Depression of the 1930s. While this new species of capitalism would doubtless go through a painful period of evolution, its character would be fundamentally optimistic because it would be driven by four historic transformations. Those transformations helped trigger the 2008 crisis, but their roots are in the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

First, the end of the initial wave of communism created a world that was unified under a single property-based economic system. Second, the opening of China and India added 3 billion producers and consumers to global markets. Third, the revolution in information technology made globalization possible by slashing communications and logistics costs. Fourth, the worldwide adoption of pure paper money ? money not backed by gold, silver, currency pegs or any other arbitrary standards of value ? allowed governments to stabilize macroeconomic cycles to a previously unimaginable degree.

Looking at the opinion polls, there is no contest for which of the presidential candidates would be better for Europe. In a survey published this week by U.K.-based YouGov, 90 percent of European voters said they would support Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. But does this lopsided support correspond to the true interests of Europeans?

The numbers are not entirely surprising. The Republican stance on emotive social issues such as abortion, healthcare and environmental protection create an almost unbridgeable cultural divide for many Europeans. On foreign policy, there are understandable fears in Europe that a Romney administration would downgrade the United Nations, increase the risks of war in the Middle East, or possibly provoke confrontations with Russia over Georgia or NATO enlargement.

However, if we focus on the issues that are preoccupying Europeans now en masse — global economic stagnation and the deepening euro crisis — then we reach a different conclusion. Maybe Europe should root for Romney, despite his social views.

When the economic history of the 21st century is written, September 2012 is likely to be recorded as a defining moment, almost as important as September 2008. This month’s historic events ? Ben Bernanke’s promise to buy bonds without limit until the U.S. returns to something approaching full employment, Angela Merkel’s support for the European Central Bank bond purchase plans and the Bank of Japan’s decision to accelerate greatly its easing program ? may not seem earth-shattering in the same way as the near-collapse of every major bank in the U. S. and Europe. Yet the upheavals now happening in central banking represent a tectonic shift that could transform the economic landscape as dramatically as the financial earthquake four years ago.

To see why, we must go back in history 40 years, to the early 1970s. Maintaining full employment was at that time regarded as the main objective of all economic policy, and this had been the case for roughly 40 years, since the Great Depression. But by the early 1970s, voters had enjoyed decades of more or less full employment and were starting to focus on inflation rather than depression as the main threat to their prosperity. Economists and politicians were responding to this shift. Milton Friedman led a monetarist “counterrevolution” against the Keynesian obsession with unemployment, designing new economic models to challenge the Keynesian view that market economies were naturally prone to long-term stagnation. By restoring the pre-Keynesian assumption that market economies were automatically self-stabilizing, the monetarist models produced two powerful policy prescriptions directly opposed to the Keynesian views.

First, the monetarists insisted that price stability, rather than full employment, was the only legitimate target for monetary policy and government macroeconomic management more generally. Second, they argued that central bankers should not accept any direct responsibility for unemployment, since sustainable job creation depended solely on private enterprise ? full employment would be achieved automatically if inflation were conquered and market forces were allowed to operate freely, with the minimum of government interference or union constraints. A few years later, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan turned Friedman’s intellectual revolution into practical politics. On top of its economic impact, monetarism had huge ideological effects by absolving government macroeconomic management of any direct responsibility for jobs and instead attributing unemployment to regulations, unions, welfare policies and other market distortions.

Does the German Constitutional Court ruling? in favor of a European bailout fund , closely followed by the big win for pro-euro and pro-austerity parties in the Dutch general election , mark the beginning of the end of the euro crisis? Or were these events just a brief diversion on the road toward a euro breakup that began with the Greek government accounting scandals in 2009? Most likely, the answer is neither. This week’s political and legal developments have given European leaders just enough leeway to avoid an immediate collapse of the single currency, but not nearly enough to end the euro crisis.

In this respect, the German Constitutional Court has acted exactly in accord with the powerful speech delivered in Berlin this week by George Soros and published in the New York Review of Books . This accuses German policy of condemning Europe, albeit inadvertently and with the best of intentions, to “a prolonged depression and a permanent division into debtor and creditor countries so dismal that it cannot be tolerated.” Germany does this by always offering “the minimum necessary [support] to hold the euro together,” while blocking “every opportunity to resolve the crisis” once and for all.

From what he calls this tragic record of missed chances, Soros draws a conclusion similar to the one presented in my columns three months ago . Germany can continue as the economic leader of Europe only if it accepts the responsibilities of a “benign hegemon,” much as the U.S. did when it forgave Germany’s debts and launched the Marshall Plan after World War Two. If, on the other hand, Germany continues to identify debt with guilt (the German language, significantly, uses the same the word, schuld, for both concepts), it will continue blocking any resolution of the euro crisis that might involve the sharing of government debts across Europe. If, on top of this opposition to mutualizing debts, Germany retains its taboo against any monetary financing of government deficit, as practiced in the U.S. by the Federal Reserve, then Europe will be condemned to long-term depression and quite possibly a revival of national hatreds. In that case, it would be better for all concerned if Germany left the euro.

The North Atlantic hurricane season runs from mid-August to October, with a strong peak in storm activity around the middle of September. A less familiar but even more destructive pattern of disturbances is the financial hurricane season, which coincides with the meteorological one almost to the day.

Most of the great financial crises of modern history have occurred in the two months from mid-August: the Wall Street crashes of Oct. 22, 1907, Oct. 24, 1929, and Oct. 19, 1987; Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard on Sept. 19, 1931; the postwar sterling devaluation on Sept. 19, 1949; the collapse of the Bretton Woods global monetary system on Aug. 15, 1971; the Mexican default that triggered the Third World debt crisis on Aug. 20, 1982; the breakup of the European exchange-rate mechanism on Sept. 16, 1992; the Russian default on Aug. 17, 1998, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15. 2008 ? and this list could go on.

The coincidence between financial and meteorological hurricanes may not be entirely fortuitous. The global economy, like the world’s atmosphere, is a finely balanced complex system. In such systems, small perturbations can accumulate to trigger big effects. And just as the meteorological tipping points tend to occur when autumn air circulation starts to disrupt the humid air accumulated in the summer doldrums, something similar seems to happen to financial markets when trading becalmed by the summer holidays returns to normal. The result can be sudden and violent reaction to events accumulated over the summer that markets had seemed to ignore. The world economy does not, of course, experience hurricanes with the same regularity as the Caribbean. But when big events happen over the summer, financial disturbances become quite probable in the fall. This is probably the reason why September has historically been the worst month of the year for stock market performance . In fact, September is the only month in which Wall Street prices have, on average, declined since the 1920s.

The words “core” and “periphery” have become standard terms to describe the winners and losers in the euro crisis. But how could anyone with the slightest sense of history, or knowledge of art and culture, call Italy or Spain peripheral to Europe, while placing Finland and Slovakia, or even Germany and Holland, at Europe’s core?

As a part-time resident of Italy, with a home 100 km from Rome, the center of two millennia of European civilization, I could not be satisfied with this trite answer. Speaking to friends and neighbors in Italy this summer and observing the behavior of Europe’s leaders, I have been struck by a more interesting, and disturbing, explanation of the core-periphery split. These terms do not refer to the past or the present, but to plans for the future. Core and periphery are not geographic or historical descriptions, but euphemisms designed to legitimize permanent economic and political inequalities among the nations of Europe.

With every step toward a resolution of the crisis, the peripheral countries have lost political autonomy, economic opportunity and national self-esteem, while the core countries, especially Germany, have been enriched and empowered. By creating conditions in which the interest rates paid in Italy, Spain and the other Mediterranean countries are much higher than they are in Germany and its northern allies, Europe has imposed a large and permanent economic handicap not only on the governments of southern Europe but also on their private businesses and households.

Last Friday global stock markets and the euro enjoyed their biggest one-day gains of the year. The S&P 500 jumped by 2.5 percent and the euro by 1.8 percent against the dollar. This Friday we will find out whether these moves were just a blip. Why this Friday? Because that is when the U.S. government publishes its monthly employment statistics ? and these figures have more influence on global markets than anything that European leaders may or may not decide.

There are four reasons to believe this. The first is the very fact that Europe so dominates the news. Financial markets are not moved by events; they are moved by unexpected events. Once a story has appeared on newspaper front pages around the world every day for months, what are the chances that it will radically surprise? At this time last year, there was still widespread misunderstanding and complacency about the European crisis. The European Central Bank, for example, was so complacent that it was raising interest rates when it should have been cutting them. But today, investors and policymakers are obsessed with Europe’s grim prospects. A genuine surprise would have to be something much worse, or much better, than the scenarios market participants already know.

This observation leads to the second reason for shifting attention from Europe. For Europe to generate a favorable surprise that lasts for more than a few days or weeks is literally impossible. The market is too aware?that for the euro to survive it has to go through a ?lengthy and uncertain process of political federation. But Europe’s capacity for negative surprise is quite limited too. Everybody knows that Europe is in deep recession, that Greece will never repay its debts, that Spanish banks are insolvent, that debtor countries will all miss their budget targets and that German-imposed austerity will prolong the recession for years. The only news from Europe that would shock the markets would be a total breakup of the euro and Lehman-style financial meltdown. Such a breakup is possible, but it isn’t yet the most likely scenario. Unless a breakup happens, Europe will create lots of volatility, but the trend in financial markets will be set by events elsewhere.