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This was the first of several centuries that Europe did not shape. Even the 20th “American” century was played out on the battlefields of the world wars on continents and on the front lines of the Cold War. The greatest ideas of Einstein and Keynes were conceived in Europe by Europeans. The experiments of Picasso in painting, Joyce in literature, and Le Corbusier in architecture are also lumped together under the name of Modernism. European countries held colonies that brought discredit but also influence into the second half of the 20th century.
All this makes our current powerlessness feel a little more poignant. Europe lacks big tech companies, its share of global output is declining, and protectionism is on the rise, with no hope of matching the generosity of the US or China towards its domestic industries. In the world of trade, Europe has one superpower, the “Brussels effect,” which has made EU regulations the de facto global standard. Trade decoupling could even deprive Europe of the right to vote on the shape of its future.
Now, this might be a bit cliché, but tell me about your summer vacation. You’re going to Europe, right?
I think the two things are related: the irrelevance and the popularity of the continent. Europe understands how peripheral it has become, because it attracts global attention without trying, and is struggling to live up to it. It can count on a level of attention that other places have to fight for. It can get a level of tourist revenue that is almost unparalleled in the developed world. In 2019, the last pre-COVID year, tourism in Spain was 12% of GDP, in Portugal 8% and in Greece 7%. No Western country outside Europe, except New Zealand, has reached 3%. Neither has Japan or Singapore (even though the airport can be a destination in itself).
Yes, you can order a “crossont” at the patisserie and smirk at the people who are paying even more. It’s the locals who are the problem.
Europe has long been coddled, and not just by tourists. Consider the broad cultural patronage it receives as a fascinating continent. If a regime wants to flatter itself in sports, it buys Paris Saint-Germain, not the Lakers. If a Chinese provincial wants to advertise its rise to urban opulence, it must buy LVMH products, not its American counterparts. Europe should never run away from these strengths. It would be foolish not to monetize its prestige. But such mastery of the “soft” stuff might blind us to what’s going on in technology and other hard areas. The danger is that Europe becomes the geopolitical equivalent of someone too beautiful to need to do or say anything interesting. Europe could be so flattered that it doesn’t realize that this century is being written elsewhere.
So the term “tourist trap” has taken on new meaning. It’s not the tourists who are trapped. Yes, we can all smile at the sight of tourists ordering a “crossont” at a patisserie and paying a premium for it. It’s the locals who have the problem, and the problem is a kind of stagnant profits.
They say tourism devastates places. But it’s manageable. Venice banned groups of more than 25 people. Barcelona raised tourist taxes again. Europe can raise rates without losing customers, because, after all, no other place can match it in geographically compressing what can only be called good things. (I took a 75-minute flight from Zurich to London this year; 75 minutes between waking up and getting out of bed is too much for me.)
No, tourism’s “ruin” isn’t environmental. It’s psychological. Tourism discourages local desire to modernize. It promotes rigidity. There have long been circulating theories about why market reforms are difficult to implement, especially in Mediterranean Europe. These include the collectivist ethos of the Catholic Church (but how do you explain businesslike Bavaria?), leisure-inducing weather (what about Australia?), and high expectations of the welfare state (different from Scandinavia?).
None of these explanations are entirely convincing. Make no mistake, none of them were. But the point is that southern European countries have made plenty of policy mistakes and can expect to be patronized, in at least one sense of the word, by outsiders with not just hard currency but also ego-boosting attention. What an outrageous privilege. And what a neat way to decline.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
