The eurozone must bite the bullet to solve its crisis A month ago at the G8 summit in Camp David, world leaders spent a difficult couple of days hand-wringing over the eurozone crisis but failed to produce anything resembling a coherent plan of action for tackling it. Is there any reason to hope that this week's G20 gathering in Mexico will be any more productive? Probably not. This is not only because such gatherings are too large and unwieldy for complex negotiating; it is also because the key players have at no stage demonstrated the fixity of purpose that this crisis demands. It is now more than two years since the sovereign debt crisis broke in Greece and the crisis is, in reality, no nearer resolution now than it was then. Enormously costly sticking-plaster solutions have taken the place of the difficult decisions that, sooner or later, will have to be made. The internal contradictions that are implicit in the single currency cannot be ignored indefinitely. A system of fixed interest and exchange rates will not accommodate economies as divergent as those of Germany and the poorer, peripheral countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland. While this blindingly obvious structural flaw has finally been acknowledged in both Brussels and Berlin, there is as yet no sign that the eurozone's political leadership is ready to bite the bullet and draw this drama to a close, either by allowing Greece to exit from the single currency or by Germany agreeing to underwrite the eurozone's debts in a fiscal as well as monetary union. As David Cameron put it when he travelled to Camp David for the last summit, the monetary union has either to make up or break up. Let's not hold our breath. It is often said that the EU will end up doing the right thing only when it has run out of wrong things to do. Well, there are still plenty of wrong things left to do. These fundamentals are not going to change, regardless of the nature of the administration that takes over in Athens following yesterday's re-run election. The election has been widely depicted as a critical turning point for the eurozone, yet there have been many such turning points since 2010 - and still the debt crisis continues to unfold in slow motion. It would be a brave man who would wager on eurozone politicians doing anything too decisive. As we have argued before, Europe's long-term prosperity will be built not on an unworkable monetary union but on the creation of a smaller eurozone combined with the reintroduction of floating exchange rates and a single market based on co-operation rather than compulsion. That would be good for the EU, and good for this country too.