20 years ago, the EU members had the chance to resolve the issue, but they skirted around it. They joined a union where labour is free-flowing. They gave up their own currencies, and gave up their domestic monetary policy. But the elephant in the room was fiscal policy. It was the last thing that gave each country its sovereignty. Hence they chose to give broad guidelines to fiscal deficits and relied on "trust".
Today, the skeletons are out. Certain countries haven't been naughty nor nice. They had huge deficits that the more conservative members had to pay.
Is this fair? It depends on how much they want the EU to work. To survive, the EU will need to become a political union, with the ECB or an EU government deciding on how much each country can spend, and taxes to be centrally pooled. However, such an integration will mean giving up the last bastion of sovereignty. Hence, I believe the EU may disintegrate or at least cease to have a single currency. It will merely be a group of countries with free trade agreements.
