Hey, I though Americans only thought about American politics?
Europe and the Euro is a thing apart: so many people bundled together economically but without a common language, standard of living, or ethos, unless you consider the lingua franca of English and the English (Brits!), ironically, as far away from being in the Euro as they can be! So far.
The main problem I see is a matter of national characteristics. The southern people like the mañana idea, and the northern ones find it too cold to wallow in dolce far niente. At least, a couple of generations ago they did. Now, it's all some of them have ever known or want to know. Those with a work ethic (as distinct from an earlier definition of 'ethics') put their back into their job and produce what people want to buy; in Britain, we killed off the industrial base and took an easy slide into 'service' industries where you spend much time on theories and produce nothing except figures in a bank account.
This difference in attitudes and expectations becomes ever so clear when you consider the majority of expat Brits who come out to Spain with the dream of investing their all in a pub: they imagine it's going to be a piece of cake, and then realise that they ain't never going to get the prime sites at a rate that allows them to make money, and that the hours they have to work to stand still are so much greater than ever they were at home. So they go bust, leaving a bad smell and many debts behind them as they vanish off the face of the country. But, the locals soldier on and make it work, more often than not, and I think that's partly because of tradition and lower expectations and absolutely no romanticism about working in bars. And some pretty shrewd minds, well-educated or not.
Take an island like Mallorca, that I know reasonably well after 31 years: apart from tourism, there isn't anything anymore. The building boom was all about selling holiday homes to foreigners; there used to be a lot of farming (the island is far from being a desert) until the European Union paid farmers to slaughter their animals and stop growing stuff; now, instead of being pretty self-sufficient, the place relies on imports for most of everything except spuds, and even they have gone downhill in quality. The Common Agricultural Policy insists on huge subsidies for farmers, most of them French, and even a first dr¡ve through that country will reveal the wealth of working farms they have. Meanwhile, in Britain, they pay/paid farmers to 'set aside' land and do nothing with it but let Nature reclaim it... as if all that came for free! An echo of the European Ideal, except that it came first in Britain. There used to be a very good shoe industry in Mallorca; that's been decimated by Chinese imports...
Perhaps that funny definition of ethics wasn't so funny after all. International cynicism and short-termism is now the name of the game.
Rob C