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But for Europeans, there seems to be little appetite for such a compact right now. In fact, banks and their national regulators, anxious about the Greek elections and Spain’s hastily arranged bailout, are behaving more parochially than ever.

That poses a threat to the interbank lending across borders that is crucial to maintaining liquidity — the free flow of money that is the lifeblood of the global financial system.

French and German banks have clamped off much of the lending to their counterparts in Italy and Spain, which in turn are primarily giving loans to their own debt-laden governments.

And in Madrid, even after European finance ministers agreed to a 100 billion euro, or $125 billion, rescue of Spain’s failing banks, the always proud Spanish government is insisting that it — and not Brussels bureaucrats — will take charge of how and where the funds are deployed.

With interbank cooperation at perhaps its lowest level since the creation of the euro currency union, European officials say they are moving toward a broader solution.

Experts warn, though, that what is needed now is not another working paper proposing new levels of euro bureaucracy, but a clear action plan that addresses the root issue: markets and investors have lost faith in Europe’s ability to regulate its banks.

“Why do you think European banks won’t lend to Spanish banks?” asked Karel Lannoo, chief executive of the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies and an expert on bank regulation in Europe. “Because they do not trust Spanish regulators. Has Citigroup stopped lending to California? No. What we need is a single banking supervisor and a single settlement system like in the United States. And we have no time to lose.”

Top officials at the United States Treasury and the International Monetary Fund have also been warning for more than a year that there can be no easy resolution to the euro crisis until Europe solves its banking problem.

Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt — right now the closest thing the euro zone has to a banking coordinator — said Friday that he and top European Union officials in Brussels would present a master plan for the euro project in a matter of days.

A blueprint is only that, however. Substantial changes that would affect banks and national budgets would probably require treaty changes and voter approval. That process could take many months and there is no guarantee of success.

As part of the push, the European Commission published proposals this month that would include creation of a Europe-wide banking supervisor whose oversight powers would trump those of local regulators.

And to discourage the flight of bank deposits from weaker countries, a problem that has plagued Greece and now Spain, the European Commission proposed a deposit insurance fund for the entire euro zone, analogous to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the United States. Individual euro zone member nations already have deposit insurance. But the Spanish fund, for one, is nearly insolvent.

Under the Brussels proposal, a new banking regulator would also have the authority to share the financial pain of bank bailouts by forcing some holders of the bonds of bailed-out banks to absorb losses.

Hoping to impose such changes sooner than formal treaty revisions would allow, Mr. Lannoo of the Center for European Policy Studies proposed an elegant solution in a recent paper.

He says there is already an article in the European Union treaty (Article 127.5, to be exact) that would let the European Central Bank take on supervision of euro zone members’ banks, provided that the finance ministers of the 17 countries that use the euro approve such a step unanimously. That would be faster than getting the approval of 17 national governments.

And it would be in tune with a global trend of giving central banks ultimate responsibility for bank safety, while giving the European Central Bank the ability to spot and address banking disasters in countries like Ireland and Spain before they become a Europe-wide threat.

But even if support was gathering for greater banking consolidation in Europe, there would be political obstacles.

For one thing, putting the European Central Bank in charge would neuter the London-based European Banking Authority, which was set up by Brussels to oversee European banks. Although the authority has been widely ridiculed for its toothless stress tests that missed banking fiascos in Ireland and Spain, entrenched bureaucracies are seldom easy to eliminate.

Even as the policy debate proceeds, nervous European banks have been slashing their short-term loans to Italy and Spain at a time when those banks, which depend largely on such loans to survive, are desperate for capital.

French loans to Spanish banks plunged 34 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the previous quarter, according to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements.

For Italian banks, French bankers cut their exposure by 16 percent. German banks have also been increasingly wary of their Italian and Spanish peers, reducing lending to them by about 19 percent last year.

More recent data, once available, are almost certain to show even tighter purse strings, analysts say.

In the last six months, as fears about Spain and Greece have intensified, Spanish and Italian banks have been by far the biggest users of the European Central Bank’s program of cut-rate, three-year loans to banks that cannot find money elsewhere.

But instead of funneling that money back into the Spanish and Greek economies as loans to cash-starved businesses and individuals, these banks have become the primary buyers of their governments’ bonds. That has perpetuated a nasty cycle in which the problems of the government become the problems of its banks, and vice versa.

“What we are seeing is a localization of risk in Europe,” said Alberto Gallo, a senior credit strategist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in London. “Or, a reverse integration of financial and banking markets. And as this continues, it will be much harder to go back to normal.”

In many ways, the extent to which Brussels is committed to going beyond words and working papers will be tested soon in Spain. Even though Europe has agreed to lend Spain money to fix its banks, Spanish government officials continue to resist European advice on how to proceed.

For example: When Joaquín Almunia, the Spanish-born European Union commissioner for competition, said recently that at least one Spanish bank might need to be shut down, officials in Madrid rejected his suggestion. In some quarters, Mr. Almunia’s patriotism was even questioned.

Most delicate will be whether the Spanish banks receiving the largest cash injections, like the nationalized mortgage giant Bankia, will be forced to impose losses on holders of their subordinated bonds. Those are the investors whose bonds are not backed by collateral and are thus considered more risky.

Such a “bail-in” feature is a central plank of Brussels’s banking union plan, and it is widely supported by industry experts because it would punish investors for taking undue risks. In Ireland, those types of bondholders were wiped out when Irish banks were recapitalized.

In Spain, though, the problem is that 62 percent of the holders of Bankia’s subordinated debt are Spanish individual investors, not overseas hedge funds and investment banks. It is not likely that Madrid will be willing to hit those citizens with a 65 percent loss — the loans are currently priced at about 35 cents on the dollar — at a time of 25 percent unemployment in the country.

It is too early to know whether Brussels will override Spanish political considerations and force such a write-down as a condition for lending bailout money. If it does not, doubts will continue over Europe’s ability to deliver a banking union plan with real authority.

“There are compelling reasons for the euro zone to insist on losses for subordinated and even senior bondholders, the least of which is a reduction in moral hazard,” said Adam Lerrick, an expert on banking and sovereign debt at the American Enterprise Institute. “Losses for bondholders is now euro zone policy, so Europe’s credibility is also at stake.”