I don’t see any such clever deal that would make of Europe’s crisis an opportunity for a renewed push toward a United States of Europe. The integrative dream has faded. Europe, for the foreseeable future, will remain in the halfway house of monetary union, fiscal divergence and à la carte national politics.

The political and economic logic of the single currency remains un-assumed. Greece is a far smaller economy than crisis-hit California, but thanks to Hamilton, California’s travails are absorbed within a huge economy where most taxing and spending is done by the federal government. Athens agonistes has no such cushion.

That leaves the question of how Europe will deal with its crisis. Here in Spain unemployment is running at 19 percent and, in southern Andalusia, it’s at 26 percent. Outside one Andalusian village, Pórtugos, I saw a “recreational center” halfway up a mountain, apparently never used, displaying the symbol of the E.U. in recognition of money pumped in to build this useless foible (and enrich a few locals.) Such profligacy for the PIGS is over.

For all these countries, austerity looms. Ireland has led the way by slashing public-sector wages by 7 percent. Greece needs to follow suit, but whether labor unions will allow that is unclear. Unless Athens cuts back, it’s not going to persuade people to buy its bonds.

A Greek default remains possible as long as Europe has not decided how to treat those that have not “equally done their duty.” The European Commission is awaiting a Greek plan on deficit reduction by mid-March before deciding if some bailout is possible. Default would have the merit of demonstrating the cost of European incoherence, but even little Greece is probably too big to fail.

Meanwhile, as the Greek daily Eleftherotypia noted the other day, it’s time “to say goodbye to the Greece you knew”: the Greece of boundless pleasures, forever captured by the great poet Constantine Cavafy, who wrote:

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,

how he always believed — what mad-

ness —

that cheat who said: “Tomorrow. You