Budget cuts are never painless, but within a monetary union individual cuts can be excruciating.
The problem is this: these countries - in a monetary union - cannot devalue.
Yet the euro zone has amply demonstrated the dangers of entering a monetary union without fiscal union.
But when devaluation requires exiting a monetary union, the resulting financial implosion has to be factored in.
And in a monetary union, members surely have a right to speak up if others act recklessly.
But in a monetary union, where an individual country can no longer cut interest rates, nothing cushions the blow.
In a monetary union, irresponsibility by one member endangers the well-being of others.
The deepest financial crisis in a century has exposed the fragility of a monetary union without a fiscal and economic union.
Increasingly, young people are realising that in a monetary union there is not the option of devaluation to make their economies competitive.
In a monetary union, however, this is obviously no longer an option.
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The basic arguments about whether countries should have a monetary union were laid out by Robert Mundel back in the 1960s.
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To create a fiscal and banking union without a political union would multiply the original mistakes in the creation of a monetary union.
Many sceptics were prompted to ask what hope there could be for a monetary union among countries unable to keep national currencies aligned.
But the Germans suspected France's southern push had other goals: a monetary union likelier to tolerate both greater fiscal laxity and more political meddling.
"Originally we were promised a monetary union, without political or economic union, " says Sampo Terho, an MEP from a Eurosceptic Finnish party, the True Finns.
The price is still being paid with wages and costs being slashed in an attempt for these mainly southern countries to regain competitiveness within a monetary union.
Secondly, there is an acceptance that the eurozone is moving beyond a monetary union to a fiscal union, with much greater central control over tax and spending.
Many of its architects saw it as a means of advancing political union in Europe and were barely interested in a monetary union as an economic venture.
It is by now a familiar story of a leader bound into a monetary union having to change the culture of his country in order to try and regain competitiveness.
Is the euro a monetary union or monetary prison?
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Writing in the Financial Times, Howard Davies and David Green call for more candour from Europe's politicians, explaining why in a monetary union responsibility for debt has to be shared, or why purely national budgets cannot continue.
The successive waves of market attacks on countries have exposed an inherent fragility of a monetary union of states in which each stands behind its own debt but with the usual escape routes of devaluation and inflation no longer available.
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But if France now believes the answer to the current crisis is a monetary union where responsibility for debts are shared then it follows that a new set of political arrangements are required in which responsibility for economic decision-making is also shared.
That is unless those that have vested interests in holding the signle currency together decide that it is time for a true monetary union.
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It will be in the best interests of both the Scottish and UK economies for an independent Scotland to continue to use sterling, as part of a formal monetary union.
However, the way that the European Union and the eurozone are set up a country leaving the monetary union would be considered to be a shocking defeat for the whole European ideal.
Second, European leaders are working to lay out a path to financial union, which is a necessary complement to monetary union.
First, European leaders are working to lay out a path to financial union, which is a necessary complement to monetary union.
The U.S. should urge Mexico and Canada to begin negotiations for a North American monetary union.
But they also made clear that, unless Greece slashed the state's role in the economy, it would not be taken seriously as a candidate for monetary union.
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