As mentioned before, there are huge differences within 'Europe'. Generally the countries in the north-west of Europe are doing ok. They feel the crisis, but managed to keep the amount of extra homeless people and drama under control. This is not true for the rest of Europe. In the south of Europe (Spain, Portugal, possibly Greece), they had a lot of extra homeless people and had to open some kind of storehouses for them to sleep in. There are very few jobs there, so a lot of people have a really hard time living. (2 of my colleagues come from respectively Spain and Portugal). However in Portugal and Greece, they seem to be on the long road to recovery, when it comes to national debt that is. For the east of Europe, it depends largely on the country, some of them are still suffering from the collapse of the USSR and have never had the financial means to really recover. Even Poland and some of the 'richer' countries are having financial trouble and the crisis didn't make it better. This is the citizens, not the countries themselves btw.
I live in Belgium, so I will discuss that more in detail :). Belgium has 11 million in habitants and if I count right 5 different governments, so please don't shoot me if I make a mistake because they changed something in the walloon part of the country. We have very cheap healthcare (about 250 Euro a year for me, at age 25). The general healthcare is organised via the government, but the costs for hospitalisation can still run up, up to a maximum amount, after which all costs are for the government. Because it is so cheap however, a lot of people have another hospitalisation insurance, so they avoid that risk. This is included in the 250 Euro. The hospitalisation insurance is also frequently offered by employers.
Our education system is really cheap, the costs are maximaly 1000 Euro a year for college, if you don't have a state grand. This doesn't mean the same as in the USA however, it is solely dependent on income (of the parents) as they are expected to pay the costs for their childrens college. The parents do however get 'child support' which is also a governmental subsidy to have children, it depends only on how many children you have and their ages, not on how much money you make.
Our retirements are at this moment funded by the government (aka other people working and paying tax), but they are stimulating your own savings, only to take out at age 65 of course. So far things are going good, I am wondering whether that will be true for the future though.
The disadvantage is that in order to pay for that, we have relative high taxes in compared to the USA, the average tax rate on a median income would be 33%, but it works with scales, the highest being 50%. The BTW (=VAT) is between 6% (on food) and 21%. I always thought this was high, till I read what the taxes in the USA are and what health insurance is, all in all, we are paying about the same, but I prefer what I get through the system here.
Oh yes, I forgot, unemployment is not limited in time, and an amount a Mustachian could live on (and perhaps even save a little).
On monetary sentiments, I never knew we thought the same as the Germans, so look to the post of Dakini.
Thank you for reading through my story, sorry for the length of it.