These are the two all-important words missing from Stiglitz'

today's eurozone leadership may lack the political will to carry them out

It's not just a matter of political will. Even the fiscal compact, itself an intergovernmental treaty, took two years to negotiate and approve under duress.

What Stiglitz proposes could only be agreed in the throes of another crisis affecting Germany. But the politically ascendant insurgent force in Germany is not Varoufakis' DiEM25, but the extreme-right AfD. And the now anti-euro FDP is making a comeback.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman