A PLUME BOOK
WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT EUROPE
MELISSA ROSSI is an award-winning journalist who has written articles for Newsweek, National Geographic Traveler, Newsday, Esquire, George, MSNBC, the New York Observer, and the London Times. She has written extensively about Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and has lived abroad for many years.
ALSO BY MELISSA ROSSI
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W H A T E V E R Y
A M E R I C A N
SHOULD KNOW ABOUT
E U R O P E
The Hot Spots, Hotshots, Political Muck-ups, Cross-Border Sniping, and Cultural Chaos of Our Transatlantic Cousins
Melissa Rossi
A PLUME BOOK
PLUME
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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Originally published in Great
Britain by Penguin Books Ltd. in different form as The Armchair Diplomat on Europe.
First American Printing, December 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Melissa Rossi, 2005
All rights reserved
Map design, pp. 7–390, by Karl Abramovich. Template: CIA’s World Factbook.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rossi, M. L. (Melissa L.), 1965–
What every American should know about Europe: the hot spots, hotshots, political muck-ups, cross-border sniping, and cultural chaos of our transatlantic cousins / by Melissa Rossi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-65062-2
1. Europe—Civilization. 2. Europe—History. 3. Europe—Description and travel. I. Title.
D1055.R59 2006
940—dc22
2006024070
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Helvetica and Grotesque Black
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To all those who long to see life on the other side
of the Atlantic, with the hopes that their
dreams are realized
Acknowledgments
This book was made possible due to the kindness of thousands of Europeans who took me out, put me up, put up with me, and rarely let me down in assorted corners of the continent. Whether they were offering their guest rooms, inviting me to dinners, teaching me languages, hauling my camel caravan’s worth of luggage, helping me find lodging, telling me jokes, or offering insights on living in their countries, so many total strangers enlightened me and made my life so sweet that Europe feels like a second home. Particularly, I will be eternally grateful to Miss Laura Milan of Milan for diligent research; Roxanne Rowles for scathing insights; Sophie Cotter for digging up info and photos; Katherine Dunn for being the most gracious person on the planet; Melik “The Research God” Boudemagh for all-purpose brilliance; Anne Pramaggiore and the Pramaggiore clan for fab vacations; Karl Abramovic for his fine maps; Sarah Jane Kincaid and Enrique García Lozano for rushing my coffee-drenched laptop to the computer doctor; Erin and Marcello for Florentine nights on the Duomo-hugging terrace; Sarah and Nancy Jenkins for amazing dinners in the Tuscan countryside; my husband from another life, Stefano Bemer, who always hit the nail on the head (while crafting his world-famous shoes); Eva, Max, Marina, Sofia, and Bill for opening the doors to foreign lands; Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga and her assistant Aiva Rozenberga for welcoming me to the presidential castle; Estonian prime minister Juhan Parts and his assistants for meeting with me in Tallinn; fashion designer Asnate Smeltere and artists Ritums Ivanovs and Andris Vitolins for showing me Riga; Lee Anthony Courchesne for opening up Barcelona’s multicultural magnet Andu; Anne Millereau for (amazingly) making Brussels fun; National Geographic Traveler for sending me across all corners of Europe; Newsweek for eye-opening assignments; Catherine and Sam Couplan for Monday night dance-a-thons; Krasny, the sexiest DJ at “The Nest”; Philippe Herzog and Gypsy for all-night Parisian tours; Ricky Burdett, Christina Roosen, Luis Afonso, master musician “Don G,” puppeteer PJ and Mifalda of Portugal for astute insights; Davil for showing me Denmark despite my shared nationality with Danny Kaye; Peter Lemeer in Maastricht, who helped put together the pieces of the puzzle; the particularly helpful tourism boards of Spain, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Belgium, and all European tourism boards (except for those in Britain and France) who kindly donated pictures; the thousands of Europeans whom I interviewed on planes, trains, and in bars and cafés; the many politicians and academic sorts who provided invaluable info; Plume production editor Lavina Lee for overseeing a million important details and, with production queen Norina Frabotta, transforming this from a mountain of words to a physical book; Eve Kirch for her brilliant layout design; Melissa Jacoby for the great cover; Lily Kosner for organizing a mass of photos; Plume’s visionary leader Trena Keating and my inspirational editor Emily Haynes for bringing this out in the U.S.; and, as always, a deep thanks to my agent Bill Gladstone (and his accountant Maureen Maloney) for perpetual optimism and his modern-day Marshall Plan.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Old Europe
Introduction
1. France
2. Germany
3. United Kingdom
4. Italy
5. Belgium
6. Ireland
7. Spain
8. Portugal
9. The Netherlands
10. Austria
11. Greece
12. Scandinavia: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway
13. Denmark
14. Sweden
15. Finland
16. Luxembourg
Part II: New Europe
Introduction
17. Poland
18. Hungary
19. Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania
20. Estonia
21. Latvia
22. Lithuania
23. Former Czechoslovakia: Czech Republic and Slovak Republic
24. Czech Republic
25. Slovak Republic
26. Slovenia
27. Cyprus
28. Malta
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
I was born in Dayton, Ohio. When people asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, the answer was always the same: “Move!” My answer invariably provoked the same response from Daytonians: “Why move? Life’s the same everywhere.”
After spending the better part of two decades hopscotching across the planet, I can say with great confidence in the direction of that capital of suburban ennui: “You’re wrong!” Life amid the olive trees and vineyards of Tuscany is not the same as life in windmill-happy Holland, where the masses still bicycle to work. Life in party town Barcelona is not the same as life in Budapest, where depression seems to hover like a permanent cloud. The oh-so-polite Brits are not the same as the charmingly gruff French; thoughtful Swedes are not the same as shy Portuguese; Germans are just not the same as, well, anybody else. Europe is entirely different from the United States, where culture is more or less homogenous from state to state. Europe is different not only from country to country but from region to region. In Europe, you need only move thirty miles to have a dialect change and a totally different take on cuisine.
And, as you are about to discover, Europe is at the most curious moment of her history. Certainly there have been more violent times, when emperors, kings, and knights launched battles and wars that left the ground blood-soaked and scorched. There have been more volatile eras, when ideas and ideals brewed up revolutions that had heads rolling in the streets. And there have been more repressed periods, as when half the continent was forced into Communism and the other half turned its back and tried to forget. But at least for most of European history, you could point at what was Europe and what wasn’t.
Eight of the ten countries that came into the European Union in 2004 were Communist for over four decades after the Second World War; seven of those were Soviet republics or satellites.
Now, thanks to recent political changes, the image of “The Continent” has been revamped: Europe now stretches to Cyprus, which dangles forty miles from Syria, but somehow currently skips Turkey, which lies along the way; Romania and Bulgaria are part of it geographically at least, but it often excludes Russia, Moldova, and the Ukraine. It apparently extends nearly to Africa since it now includes Malta, but Britons debate whether the western-flung United Kingdom is really even part of Europe anymore, or if she ever was.
What’s changed is there’s now a strong push to shove Europe into one entity: the European Union, a “supranational umbrella government” that in some ways treats its twenty-five member countries like states. The EU can make laws, which member countries are supposed to adopt, but the biggest draws to EU membership—and the reasons it expanded from fourteen members in 1994 to twenty-five members a decade later—are the economic lures and the fact that the EU can increase profitability for all member nations. For one thing, the EU (with 455 million residents) can act as a powerful bloc that can at least try to rival the U.S. Member countries pay dues according to their GDP and redistribute the wealth; poorer countries can access many billions of dollars’ worth of funding to bring them closer to the EU norm. Despite their language differences, historical grudges, and divergent personalities, EU countries trade without tariffs, limit production of competing goods, and engage in multicountry economic ventures, such as the hugely successful Airbus (a joint production of France, Germany, the UK, and Spain). The EU also introduced a common currency in 2002: the euro, now stronger than the dollar. Currently used by twelve EU countries, and in the future (theoretically) to be adopted by all, the euro has negated the need for trading in Italian lira for French francs, or Dutch guilders for Spanish pesetas every time you cross a border. In fact, traveling in Europe is a bizarrely different experience since the EU lifted most border guards. Where you once spent hours being stopped by passport control, you now just zip across the boundaries with little to notify you that the language and country just changed except for small “Welcome” signs. And EU residents (at least those in Western Europe) can resettle and take jobs in other EU countries without hassle. Londoners can easily work in Madrid, Romans can set up in Paris, and Danes can move to Berlin without going through mountains of paperwork.
Not all of Europe is in the EU. In Western Europe, Norway and Switzerland decline membership, and only eight countries from Eastern Europe are now in. This book covers only those countries that are in the EU as of June 2006.
So much has changed so quickly in Europe that most Europeans, be they Lithuanians or Luxembourgers, can’t keep up. Many Europeans can’t tell you which countries are among those in the EU. They have an image of the European Union as little more than a money machine in Brussels that dumps a mountain of euros out of a slot. And they still seem somewhat perplexed at the EU’s ongoing enlargement, which saw ten new countries enter in 2004—and has countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey preparing to someday join up. The Europeans’ confusion about the current status of Europe is what prompted me to write this book in the first place as The Armchair Diplomat on Europe (Penguin UK, 2005).
Until recently, most people in EU member countries regarded the European Union as a topic more boring than taxes, the understanding of which was as daunting as unraveling a DNA molecule. “The EU doesn’t affect me,” Europeans said with a shrug, while the EU was passing laws about everything: the types of food that Europeans eat, how it is cultivated, and how much Europeans pay for it; what power source fuels European electricity; the airlines, ships, and lorries that enter European countries; property sales to foreigners; and how minorities are treated.
My American editors at Plume surprised me when they wanted a version of The Armchair Diplomat for the U.S. This book is updated, shortened, and Americanized, though it’s still thick with European history and culture that we rarely learn in school. Although Americans tend to view Europe as little more than an oversize Disneyland, brimming with wine, cheese, and handsome devils with exotic accents, Europe is more than simply a vacation destination full of castles, kings, and antiquities. Europe as a whole is a huge trading partner with the U.S.—we swap over $1 billion in goods and services every day with France alone—and her stable, democratic, industrialized countries are the ones most similar to ours on the planet. Europe is where most of our ancestors came from, and it was the birthplace of many of the ideals we hold dear, including democracy, inalienable rights to all, and freedom of religion.
There are differences, of course. Having pummeled itself nearly to death during two world wars, Europe is often more reluctant to engage in armed battle—although many European countries still require one year of military service for males. Western Europeans tend to have more “socialized” economies, with health care and low-cost drugs as part of the package—although many Europeans pay higher taxes than we do. Europeans have abolished the death penalty, and many look askance at the U.S. for continuing it. European cities tend to be pedestrian friendly and offer great public transport, lessening the need for cars, and Europeans, particularly the French and Italians, are obsessed with food, a topic they can talk about for hours. After centuries of religious wars—that at times killed a third of their populations—Europeans tend to be less religious than Americans, and they like to get into political debates. And even though their views toward the U.S. governmen
t have generally changed since George W. Bush rode in, they still are curious about us.
In short, Europe is anything but a snooze these days, and the next few years will either see Europe rise as a unified superpower or see it collapse and implode. In the pages that follow, you can glean insight into the players, the histories, the issues, and the dynamics involved in what is called “the greatest peacemaking project in history.”1
Melissa Rossi
PART I
OLD EUROPE
INTRODUCTION
You can call it “Old Europe,” you can call it “Western Europe and Greece,” you can call it “the Europe Americans think of when they think of Europe.” But whatever you call it, this is the energetic power center of Europe, the industrial heartland, and the population core of what is now the European Union.
OLD EUROPE
France: Most land, most pushy, biggest food producer
Germany: Most people, biggest economy, most anxious
United Kingdom: Most aligned with U.S., least likely to use euro
Italy: Most embarrassing ex-prime minister, best political soap opera
Belgium: Most eurocratic: headquarters of EU and “capital of Europe”
Ireland: Best example of how EU can turn a place around
Spain: Most fun, highest unemployment rate
Portugal: Most behind, highest illiteracy rate
The Netherlands: Most tired of being ignored
Austria: Most vehemently antinuclear, first to start immigration debate
Greece: Most easterly, most tied up with Cyprus
Denmark: Most surprising: anti-immigration, antieuro
Sweden: Most likely to suffer mysterious political assassinations
Finland: Most gung ho of Scandinavian countries about EU
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