Finance ministers and central bank governors from the 27 member states of the European Union meet in Poland tomorrow and Saturday (16-17 September) knowing that the eurozone stands on the edge of disaster.

Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, is flying across the Atlantic to join the meeting, such is the scale of concern around the world about the fate of the eurozone. Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, promised yesterday (14 September) that his country was ready to help. “What is most important now is to prevent the further spread of the sovereign-debt crisis in Europe,” he said, adding that he would discuss possible support for the eurozone with Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa when those countries’ finance ministers meet next Thursday (22 September).

Jan Vincent-Rostowski, the finance minister of Poland, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers, will be hosting the informal council of finance ministers which begins in Wrocław on tomorrow morning. Yesterday he warned during a debate in the European Parliament: “If the eurozone breaks up, the European Union is not going to survive much longer and the consequences for that would be dramatic indeed.”

Last night, as European Voice went to press, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, was scheduled to hold a conference call with Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, and George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, to discuss Greece’s attempts to bring its budget deficit under control.

Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s finance minister, met Philipp Rösler, Germany’s economics minister, yesterday in Rome to discuss the danger of the debt crisis spreading.

Rösler, the most senior Liberal in Germany’s coalition government, had angered Merkel by talking of a possible default by Greece on its sovereign debt.

She sought to quash speculation that a Greek default  was imminent, saying on Tuesday (12 September) that Germany and its eurozone partners were “using all the means at our disposal” to ensure that a Greek default did not happen, “because we would see domino effects very quickly”.

But last night Alexander Lambsdorff, the head of the German Liberals in the European Parliament, echoed Rösler’s views. He said: “We need to continue to think confidentially about an orderly Greek default within the eurozone.” Restructuring of Greek debt should not be taboo, Lambsdorff said, because Greek debt levels were “unsustainable”.

Speaking in the European Parliament yesterday, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, described the crisis as “the most serious challenge of a generation”. He urged member states to act on the deal reached at the 21 July summit of eurozone leaders, which was supposed to strengthen the eurozone’s bail-out capacity.

But financial markets have been unconvinced by the 21 July declaration. The euro has since weakened on the foreign exchanges, the cost of government borrowing has risen on the bond markets and the credit-rating agencies have downgraded their opinions of Malta and Cyprus.

The European Central Bank disclosed on Wednesday that this week it had lent $575 million (€418m) to two unnamed banks in the eurozone – a sign of their growing difficulty in obtaining dollar funding as US investors withdraw from the eurozone.

Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian Green MEP and a member of the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee, urged national leaders to act decisively. “One of the reasons markets are insecure is because of a real inability of European leadership to take action that fixes the problem,” he said.

Sony Kapoor of Re-define, an  economic think-tank, said that Geithner’s attendance at the meeting, which comes only a week after he attended an unproductive meeting of G7 finance ministers, confirmed how serious the situation had become.

Interviewed on American television yesterday (14 September), Geithner said that there needed to be “more force” to commitments made by eurozone member states to introduce measures to calm financial markets, but he added that he was convinced that they had the “the financial capacity, the economic capacity, to do what it takes to hold this thing together”.