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This is the first century of several that Europe will not shape. Even the twentieth, the “American” one, was developed on the battlefields of the World War and on the front lines of the continent’s Cold War. The most important ideas, those of Einstein and Keynes, were conceived by Europeans in Europe. So were those experiments (Picasso’s in painting, Joyce’s in literature, Le Corbusier’s in architecture) that we group under the name of Modernism. European states had colonies well into the second half of the century, which brought them discredit, but also influence.
All of which makes our current helplessness sting a little. Europe lacks big tech companies, has a small share of global production, and as protectionism spreads, there is no hope of matching American or Chinese largesse in domestic industries. In a trading world, Europe had a superpower, the “Brussels effect,” whereby EU regulations became the de facto global standard. Trade fragmentation could deprive Europe of even that vote on the shape of the future.
Now, at the risk of a swim: tell me about your summer vacation. It’s about Europe, right?
I suggest that these two things – the continent’s irrelevance and its popularity – are related. As Europe unintentionally demands the world’s interests, it struggles to understand how marginal it has become and to respond. You can count on levels of care that other places must strive for. You can earn a level of income from visitors that is almost unique in the rich world. In 2019, the last year before Covid, tourism accounted for 12 percent of GDP in Spain, 8 percent in Portugal and 7 percent in Greece. No Western nation outside Europe except New Zealand reached 3 percent. Neither does Japan nor (despite an airport that could be a destination in itself) Singapore.
In Europe it is always sweetly spoken: “You matter”, and not only among tourists. Consider the broader cultural patronage it receives as a continent of glamour. If a regime wants to wash away sports, it acquires Paris Saint-Germain, not the Lakers. If a Chinese rural dweller wants to trumpet his rise to urban wealth, LVMH products, not their American equivalents, are de rigueur. Europe should never retreat from these strengths. It would be crazy not to monetize your own prestige. But such a mastery of the “soft” stuff could blind you to what’s going on in technology and other more difficult areas. The danger is that Europe becomes the geostrategic equivalent of a person too beautiful to need to do or say anything interesting. You may be flattered not to realize that the author of the century is written elsewhere.
And so the phrase “tourist trap” takes on a new meaning. Those trapped are not the visitors. Yes, smile as much as you want when they order a “cross-ont” at the pastry shop and, furthermore, pay extra. The locals are the ones who have the problem, and the problem is a kind of lucrative stagnation.
It is said that tourism loots places. But that can be managed. Venice has banned tour groups of more than 25 people. Barcelona has increased its tourist tax again. Europe could charge more without losing custom because, in the end, no other place can match it in terms of sheer geographical compression of what we can only call good things. (This year I traveled from Zurich to London in 75 minutes on a flight. I can’t wake up and get out of bed in 75 minutes.)
No, the “plague” of tourism is not, or is not only, environmental. It’s something mental. It undermines a place’s incentive to modernize. Rewards ossification. Theories have long circulated about why market reforms are so difficult to implement in Mediterranean Europe in particular. These include: a certain collectivist spirit in Catholicism (but then how to explain corporate Bavaria?), a climate so good that it induces a taste for leisure (what about Australia?) and high expectations of the welfare state ( unlike Scandinavia?).
None of these explanations quite work. Surely, no one could ever do it. But it is important that southern Europe can get a lot wrong in terms of policy and still expect to be patronized, at least in one sense of the word, by outsiders who not only have hard currency but also attention that stimulates the ego. What an exorbitant privilege! And what a nice way to decline.
janan.ganesh@ft.com