So often the source of rows between its members, the European Union starts reviewing its rules for national budgets on Tuesday to fit with a post-pandemic reality of increased public debt and the huge cost of transitioning to zero emissions economy.
During the landmark review - likely to take at least until 2022 - governments will debate how to simplify the so-called Stability and Growth Pact which has grown so complex that few people understand it fully.
What began in 1997 as two regulations and a resolution of some 12 pages in total has since multiplied several times and is accompanied by a 108-page user manual, updated every year by the European Commission.
The primary aim of the Pact is to curb government borrowing by protecting the value of the euro, since while the Euro zone has a single monetary policy underpinning its currency, each country of 19 euro countries sets its own budget policy.
This has been the source of many frictions over the years. In 2002 then Rome president Romano Prodi called pact stupid, a judgement he stands by today.
It gave me a lot of problems at the time, but later on most people said I was right because they saw that in difficult times the Pact didn't work, Prodi told Reuters. The dangers of run national fiscal policies with a single currency came to the forefront in 2010 when excessive borrowing by Greece, secret from the EU's statistics office and the Commission that enforces the rules, led to the sovereign debt crisis which nearly destroyed the currency.
The Pact has been changed three times so far so far - - in 2005, when France and Germany would not accept applying the rules to themselves and in 2011 and 2013 during the debt crisis to ensure markets that investments in the euro were safe.
Changes now drafted are also a reaction to a crisis - this time caused by the COVID - 19 pandemic that has boosted average debt in the eurozone to around 100% of national output from 60 - 70% in the early 1990's when the rules were debated.
The current debt reductions required by annual rules are simply not realistic for countries with debts of 160% of GDP like Italy or more than 200% like Greece.
A debt target of 60% made sense when Maastricht Treaty was negotiated, but it doesn't make sense now, said Klaus Regling, the head of the Euro zone bailout fund and former head of the Commission's economic department.
The capital capacity of governments is higher today than what was assumed in the Maastricht Treaty, so these are elements one has to look at, Regling said.
Many finance ministers believe that debt reduction requirements are too important in the post-pandemic world, there is no agreement yet about whether they can be reached through the interpretation of existing laws or only through more difficult changes to legal texts.
The other big challenge is to make sure that the rules do not tie countries' hands at a time when EU must mobilise hundreds of billions of euros to bring net CO2 emission to zero by 2050.
An analysis by the Bruegel think-tank for EU finance ministers in September showed additional public investment to meet the EU climate goals will have to be 0.5% - 1.0% of GDP annually during this decade alone. Bruegel proposed exempting investment from EU deficit calculations to fight climate change and saving the planet for future generations.
While the idea has the overall backing of Spain, France and others, officials also point out the difficulty in defining what is and doesn't require green investments. Valdis Dombrovskis, which is nominated by Commission Vice President, has said the idea of investment exemption will definitely be part of the next discussion.
But some officials already believe that the Pact is flexible enough and any further relaxation could lead to trouble down the road.
The call for easing or reform has always been wrong and it has always existed. Would it be a mistake to relax the rules now, Reuters told. The former German finance minister Theo Waigel is called the father of the euro because of his role in setting up the rules in the 1990's.
Some countries wanted to exclude investments, others the pandemic costs, back some countries military spending from the stability pact calculations. Over the years, there has always been something government wanted to exclude. But it was always right for people to resist, he said.