Unemployment in Europe

I was playing around with the excellent Google Public Data Explorer, which graphs data from Eurostat:

Unemployment in Greece and Spain is up to 25%. In Ireland unemployment has reached 15%, the same as during the 1980s, and just like then it is been held in check by emigration. I guess Greeks and Spaniards aren't emigrating, the Greeks I can understand, no one speaks Greece, but the Spanish have the white countries of Latin America to move to. For comparison, 25% is about the unemployment rate in Germany and the USA during the Great Depression. Not good stuff, don't be surprised if we see major upsets in the future in those two countries. At the very least faith in the European project and the bona fides of Greater Germany as a force for good has been destroyed.

The UK is doing much better than Ireland, which is what happens when you have your own currency and monetary policy. On our entry into the Euro, we were basically told that monetary policy didn't matter any more, and that any economic accomodation to circumstance would be achieved by "internal adjustment". Meaning that wages and prices would just have to rise and fall on their own, without any currency revaluation. Obviously "internal adjustment" has never worked well, historically speaking, and certainly can't work with high debt levels in an arbitrary unit of account like the Euro. Europe won't recover until countries start to leave the Eurozone.