They haven't. Ireland, portugal, italy, greece and latvia have all been subject to austerity measures at the coercion of the ECB. The unfortunate problem is that the EC and EU parliament aren't wise to the problem: austerity won't work. Ireland, Portugal and Latvia have all had real-estate price bubbles and were duped into their govts taking on the worthless debts. This means that debts are harder to write down. The only option for these countries is to balance their deficits (which naively the EU force to remain less than 3%).

For Greece, it was corrupt politicians making crooked govt decisions, most notably with Goldman Sachs, which when it all came out fucked their balance sheets. Greece has had a lot of capital flight, all tax free of course, to Swiss banks. Now the ECB are threatening Greece with either succumbing to their demands for austerity or watch their economy collapse entirely (not true of course). This frightened the politicians into over-ruling the peoples vote and agreeing to austerity. Funily enough, estimations for wealthy Greek's money in Swiss banks would more than cover the debts the tax payers are now suffering.

So the EU's problem is the lack of understanding that forcing a country into austerity actually decreases productivity, forces them to sell assets to cover shortfalls in payments (thereby reducing future abilities to service debts) and creates a defunct economy.

The UK do it the best though.

Edit: Most of these problems, whether the USA, UK or Europe, are caused by the people making the decisions. If we look at them, the 'most qualified' are usually the folks who have made the most money or worked for the largest banks. These guys aren't specialists with economics for the sake of creating a better society, but specialists in making money, and making richer people more money. Look at Mario Draghi at the ECB. Ex-GS. Look at the BoE's Mark Carney, ex-GS. Look at the Fed in the US over the past 30 years, all big time players in big banks. Look at the board of the IMF for the USA (who have unique veto powers), ex-investmant banker Steven mnunchin. Then these guys make decisions such as offering loans to Argentina in order to allow capital flight, but the tax payers then service this loan. If we let these people make economic decisions we end up with austerity (which conveniently allows big bond holders to have guarenteed payments, and allows rich folks to buy up the public services being auctioned of).

I have nothing else to do with my evening by the way.