France, Ireland and Denmark - all European countries - are currently in a recession. The global credit crisis added to their economic woes, causing the economies to not only stop growing, but shrink.

Germany and Britain, meanwhile, are teetering. They are trying to delay announcing a recession for it only appears a case of time before they too will announce that their economies have entered into a major recession, the likes of which we have not seen in decades.

“At this point it is a very fragile situation,” says Eswar Prasad, an international economics professor at Cornell University and a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “There is a crisis of confidence more than anything else.”

Perhaps confidence does indeed play a significant role, but confidence alone does not explain the horrible condition of so many economies in the world, and especially not in Europe, where customers have been less up-to-date about the state of the economy than in the United States. If it were a matter of confidence only, the U.S. would have slipped into a recession first, and Europe would have followed. The facts are, however, different.

Experts believe that the U.S. economy is either already in a recession or at the brink of one, which means their is actually a debate possible about the question. In France, Denmark and Ireland, however, no questions can be asked. It’s perfectly clear that their economies are in a recession.

They also believe that this recession may last for up to a year - a long recession indeed, but, it has to be pointed out, they tend to believe that this recession will be reasonably ‘mild.’

If the crisis in the financial markets continue, however, the recession may worsen, as Peter Grier explained for the Christian Science Monitor on Tuesday.

“If financial conditions fail to improve quickly, near-term economic prospects could deteriorate markedly,” Grier quotes Chris Varvares, president-elect of the National Association of Business Economists and president of Macroeconomic Advisers, as saying in the NABE forecast.

“It is now all too clear that we are seeing a dangerous shock to mature financial markets, posing a major threat to global growth…. Even though past periods of financial stress have not necessarily been followed by recessions, we find that when the banking system suffers major damage, as in the current episode, the likelihood of a severe and protracted downturn in activity increases,” added Charles Collyns, deputy director of the IMF Research Department, at an Oct. 2 press conference.

The main cause for the problems in Europe is, aside from the financial crisis of course, that European politicians thought for too long that this was purely an American issue. This crisis, they repeatedly said, was an American one, and one only to be resolved by the American government. And even if the U.S. government would not do what’s necessary, European economies would not suffer too much.

That assessment was obviously wrong, but it took Europeans a while to realize it. Even today, quite some of Europe’s leaders seem to think that all will be fine as long as America acts responsibily to counter the crisis in the financial markets. Germany, for instance, opposes a grand European project to deal with the crisis like the U.S. deals with it, believing all will be fine in a couple of weeks time.

In the course of the fall of 2008, however, it seems likely that European governments will have to be forced to unite, and to accept that this crisis is global, not American.