WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — If you’re waiting for international policy makers to pull a rabbit out of the hat and solve the euro problem, stop holding your breath.

After a generally a desultory meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington last week, the prevailing pessimism about the future of the euro EURUSD, -0.06% came grimly to the fore in one of the many meetings held on the sidelines of the semiannual IMF gathering.

Two dozen policy makers convened by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a private London-based group, met this week to discuss the future of the European Union’s joint currency.

The off-the-record discussion involved an international array of current and former government officials, central bankers, and private-sector financiers.

The verdicts ranged from “deeply pessimistic” to “not ready to give up” — perhaps the most optimistic assessment at the meeting — and the group in its assembled wisdom concluded that there are no realistic solutions and the only course of action they could see is “muddling through.”

They rehearsed all the usual analysis of what went wrong — an attempted common currency without the underpinning of joint fiscal policy, a banking union, and most importantly, a political union with an institutional infrastructure for making decisions.

Without this follow-through on the original plan for “an ever closer union,” the EU has stumbled along a path of “incompetence,” with individual countries acting only in their own interests.

Even the European Central Bank, the only EU-wide institution that has shown itself capable of taking action in this environment, came in for criticism because its successive moves to ease the stress in the system left the political leaders off the hook in coming to terms with the underlying issues.

And yet, participants noted, the European public seems reluctant to give up the euro. Not even Greece, which has suffered terribly in the straitjacket of a common currency with Germany, is willing to give it up.

So the answer is muddling through. And muddling through is one thing Europeans excel at, even though it has brought mixed results.

Europe, after all, muddled through the arms buildup in the early 20th century to World War I. It muddled through to the banking collapse of 1931 (which contributed more to the Great Depression in the U.S. than the 1929 stock market crash).

Then it muddled through into fascism and World War II. Rebuilding from the rubble of that conflict led to a relatively brief period of constructive behavior as the continent, shielded by the U.S. defense umbrella, built new democracies and an ever-widening free trade zone.

As U.S. influence — and interest — waned, Europe began again to resort to muddling through as a way of coping with stress.

It muddled through the crisis in Bosnia and genocidal conflict at its very doorstep, until the U.S. intervened and sorted things out.

It muddled through into a joint currency that enabled its strongest member to execute a beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilist trade policy that penalized countries without the size or drive of Germany, slashing their standard of living and reducing whole swaths of the populations to penury.

Then it muddled through into a refugee crisis that threatens the very fabric and identity of individual nations, giving rise to a xenophobic backlash that harkens back to the days of Depression and fascism less than a century ago.

One participant in the OMFIF meeting this week raised the question of what the U.S. could or should be doing. But here, too, though there was some moaning about the lack of U.S. leadership in Europe, few were willing to venture any solutions from that quarter.

One of the Washington-based participants acknowledged that the discussion was, in fact, a “real downer.”

But in that it reflected the general pessimism that hung over the lackluster spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank, marked as they were by lowered forecasts for growth, worries about a British exit from the EU, the possibility of a renewed crisis in Greece, volatile oil prices, problems in emerging markets, and so on and so on.

Regarding the euro itself, David Marsh, managing director of OMFIF (and a regular contributor to MarketWatch), was equally pessimistic in the forthcoming updated edition of his book, “Europe’s Deadlock: How the Euro Crisis Could Be Solved — and Why It Still Won’t Happen.”

“Behind the euro’s manifold contradictions lie disparate and divisive forces that make clear-cut outcomes likely,” he writes in the new book. “We should prepare for neither resounding success nor catastrophic failure, but instead for a further drawn-out phase of standoff, slowdown and stalemate.”

A cheery prospect that could be summed up as, well, muddling through.

The danger, as history has shown and one of the participants in the OMFIF discussion warned, is that if policy makers cannot come up with a plan to unwind an unsustainable situation, events could impose an “accidental solution” that will be far worse.