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Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, at the Berlin Wall memorial. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/dpa/Corbis

Marx and Engels proclaimed in 1848 that a spectre was haunting Europe the spectre of communism.

As it turned out, the spectre did eventually materialise, in the form of Soviet communism, which spread after the second world war to eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall was built 16 years later, in 1961, to put a stop to the way East Germans were voting about communism with their feet.

There have been celebrations recently to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall in November 1989. That fall was followed in 1991 by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, a Soviet Union about which President Putin appears to harbour nostalgic feelings.

After those events there was an inevitable burst of triumphalism in the west. Some of us feared that, with the disappearance of the communist threat, some of the worst instincts of casino capitalism would be evinced; and so they were.

I myself had what I thought was a bright idea of writing a book called The Spectre of Capitalism. I hoped the catchy title would make my fortune indeed, make me a capitalist but it has to be said that sales fell woefully short of anything written by Marx.

Now the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has followed Marx with a declaration last week that a spectre is now haunting Europe the spectre of economic stagnation.

This phrase received about as much attention as that book of mine. It was uttered during the presentation of the monetary policy committees quarterly inflation report, and people were much more interested in the outlook for interest rates: the story remains that rates went outside after the financial crash, and will continue to remain outside for some time.

But, as the Bank is keen to emphasise, the outlook for the British economy is a lot better than that for Europe in general: it may be the slowest recovery in centuries, but our economy is now on the mend. However, there is a still a long way to go to make up the ground lost after Chancellor Osbornes woefully misjudged decision to abort the 2010 recovery he inherited with a needlessly deflationary and (literally) counterproductive fiscal policy.

Which brings us back to the spectre haunting Europe. Carney was not referring to David Cameron, but it intrigues me that when the prime minister and a legion of others go on about the need for reform in Europe, they are barking up the wrong tree. As Llewellyn Consulting points out in its current bulletin, the universal chant when the subject of the eurozones plight comes up is that what is needed is more structural reform.

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The spectre of communism? Europe should fear the spectre of austerity