Pointing the way: Barack Obama wants export-driven countries like Angela Merkel’s Germany to consume more too. Photograph: Reuters

The commitment by the G20 to promote “a framework for strong, sustainable, and balanced growth” is both a victory for the administration of US President Barack Obama and a mixed blessing for Europe.

It is a victory for Obama because it represents an international endorsement of the view that the global financial crisis was at least partly caused by the massive outflow of savings from the world’s largest net-export countries, which have depended upon the United States as the consumer of last resort. At a minimum, it represents an acknowledgement that the US alone cannot lead the world to recovery and that other countries will also have to add their weight to increase global demand. Growth will be strong, sustainable, and balanced, because China, Japan and Germany will be pulling their respective shares of the load.

Global acceptance of this commitment to balanced growth was not easily won, for the bias that says net exports are good and net imports are bad is strongly rooted. Before the crisis, it went without saying that the US was to blame for what were then called “global macroeconomic imbalances” as the insatiable demand of American consumers fuelled their country’s ever larger current account deficits.

Nevertheless, an impressive combination of commentary, analysis, and political pressure won the day. Financial Times Chief Economist Martin Wolf has been making the case for rebalancing global demand for much of the past two years and he presents an extended version of the argument at the core of his book on Fixing Global Finance. Four of the past five issues of Foreign Affairs include articles making similar claims and Olivier Blanchard, research director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent his own weight to the charge in the September issue of Finance and Development. When the G20 finance ministers had their preparatory meeting on September 5, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner insisted that strengthened “domestic demand-led growth” is a “global imperative”; by contrast, issues related to bank executive compensation and financial regulation run “alongside”.

This new emphasis on balanced growth is a mixed blessing for Europe because it presents a direct challenge to Germany’s reliance on exports and an implicit indictment of Europe’s economic and monetary union. The challenge is easy to interpret and widely known: so......