A Realistic Plan to Keep the Euro Zone Together

Much has been written, including by Nobel Prize winners in economics, about the euro as an economic straitjacket that's strangling southern Europe with the impossibility of currency devaluations. Yet the political reality is that in the euro zone as a whole, the euro has never been more popular -- 72 percent of its residents support it. That's why the most reasonable way to look at the single currency area is the way eurocrats do, not as a blunder but as a successful project that needs a boost to become even more successful.

That's the philosophy of a new European Commission reflection paper that suggests a euro-area reform plan while trying to skirt the political obstacles that can derail it. It doesn't necessarily achieve the latter goal, but given the nascent meeting of the minds between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, elements of the plan may soon become reality.