by Rick Steves
Europe knows what a war is. It ripped itself to shreds twice within my grandparents’ lifetime. Consider France in World War I. France (with one-quarter as many people as we have) lost as many people as the US lost in the entire Iraq War—over 4,400 people—in one day…many times. They lost as many people as we lost in Vietnam (60,000) in one month. And then it happened again and again until, by the end of World War I, an estimated half of all the men in France between the ages of 15 and 30 were casualties. When some Americans, aggravated by France’s unwillingness to take up arms, call the French “surrender monkeys,” I believe it shows their ignorance of history.
If there is a national piece of art today for the European Union, it is Picasso’s Guernica, because it reminds Europe of the reality of war. It’s easy to overlook the fact that “collateral damage” is real people.
After World War I, Europe was awakening to the destructive power of aerial bombardments. During the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hitler jumped at a chance to help his fellow fascist, General Francisco Franco, by bombing the Basque town of Guernica. Surveying the rubble of that town made it clear that technology had taken the destructive power of war to new heights. This inspired Picasso to create his greatest work. His mural Guernica memorialized the first city destroyed by an aerial bombardment and gave Europe a preview of the horrors of its fast-approaching war with frightening accuracy.
In 1947, in the rubble of a bombed-out Europe, Euro-visionaries assembled and agreed that they needed to overcome the hell that they were bringing upon themselves every couple of generations with these wars. Their solution was to unite. Of course, a union is nothing without people giving up some measure of real sovereignty. Since 1947, proponents of a European Union have been convincing the people of proud and independent nations to trade away bits and pieces of their independence. It’s a tough sell. But in a fitful evolution—two steps forward and one step back—over the last seven or so decades, they have created a European Union.
Fewer Borders, but More Ethnic Diversity
A key strategy for preserving peace in a sprawling, multiethnic state is to respect and celebrate diversity. As if inspired by America’s e pluribis unum (“out of many, one”), the European Union’s official motto is in varietate concordia (“united in diversity”).
I’m charmed by Europe’s ethnic diversity. Hop on a train for two hours and you step out into a different culture, different language, and different heritage. As I watched Europe unite, I (like many of my European friends) feared that this diversity would be threatened. But just the opposite is happening.
In today’s Europe, there are three loyalties: region, nation, and Europe. Ask a person from Munich where he’s from, and he’ll say, “I’m Bavarian,” or “I’m German,” or “I’m European,” depending on his generation and his outlook. Ask somebody from Florence, and she’ll say, “I’m Tuscan,” or “I’m Italian,” or “I’m European.”
As Europe unites, established countries are less threatened by “nations without states.” In 1999, Scotland convened a parliament in Scotland for the first time since 1707…and London didn’t stop them.
Borders and loyalties can be messy. Modern political borders are rarely clean when it comes to dividing ethnic groups. And most of the terrorism and troubles in Europe—whether Basque, Irish, Catalan, or Corsican—have been about ethnic-minority separatist movements threatening national capitals. Appreciating the needs of these people, peace-loving European leaders strive to make the Continent’s minority groups feel like they belong.
Brittany, in western France, is not ethnically French. People there are Celtic, cousins of the Welsh and the Irish. Just a couple of generations ago, Paris was so threatened by the secessionist dreams of these Celts that if parents gave their newborn a Celtic name, that child would not be granted a French national identity card. Such a policy would be laughable today.
When I first visited Barcelona in the 1970s, locals weren’t allowed to speak Catalan or dance their beloved Sardana. The Catalan flag was outlawed, so locals waved the flag of the Barcelona soccer team instead. Now, in public schools, children speak Catalan first, local flags fly proudly, and every Sunday in front of the cathedral, people gather to dance the Sardana. This circle dance symbolizes national unity as all differences are cast aside and Catalans raise their hands together to proudly celebrate their ethnicity. A Catalan person in Barcelona told me, “Catalunya is Spain’s Quebec. We don’t like people calling our corner of Iberia a ‘region’ of Spain…because that’s what Franco called it. We do not accept subjugation as a region of Spain. We are a nation without a state.”
What’s going on? Barcelona is less threatening to Madrid. Cardiff doesn’t scare London. Brittany gets along with Paris (and I don’t mean Spears and Hilton). As power shifts to the EU capital of Brussels, national capitals recognize and accept that their authority is waning. And the European Union supports transnational groups in the hopes of reminding big nations that they have more in common than they might realize.
A friend of mine, Armin Walch, is the “Indiana Jones” of Tirolean archaeologists. Bursting with ideas and projects, he loves to renovate castles in western Austria. When Armin wants money to excavate a castle, he goes to Brussels. If he says, “I’m doing something for Austria,” he’ll go home empty-handed. So instead, he says he’s doing something for the Tirol (an ethnic region that spans parts of Italy and Austria, ignoring the modern national boundary)…and gets funding.
This Tirolean archaeologist funds his vision with money from Brussels.
Europe’s “stateless nations” live in solidarity with each other. The Catalan people find Basque or Galician bars a little more appealing than the run-of-the-mill Spanish ones. They even make a point to include the other languages on their ATMs: In Barcelona, you’ll see Catalan first, then Spanish, Galego (the language of Galicia, in northwest Spain), Euskara (the Basque tongue)…and then a button for all the rest (Portuguese, Swedish, and so on). While all of these groups—Catalan, Galician, and Basque—speak the common language of Spanish, they respect each other’s native tongues as a way to honor their shared ethnic-underdog status. These groups’ affinity for each other even factors into where they travel. On a recent trip to Northern Ireland, I was impressed by how many travelers I met from Basque Country and Catalunya. Because the Basques and Catalans feel a kinship with the Catholic minority in Ireland’s Protestant North, they choose to vacation in Ulster.
Language options on an ATM show solidarity among smaller ethnic groups.
Europe Spreads East
On May 1, 2004, eight formerly communist nations joined the European Union…and suddenly the EU grew by 75 million people. In 2007 and 2013, three more additions boosted the population by another 35 million. In just a few short years, the geographical center of Europe shifted from Brussels to Prague.
Eastern Europe is changing fast. Freedom is old news, communism is a distant memory, and they have long settled into the grind of capitalism. In the 1990s, societies once forced to espouse Soviet economics embraced the capitalist work ethic with gusto—as if making up for lost time. While adjusting from the security of a totalitarian system to the insecurity of freedom, my friends there reported that younger and better-educated people jumped at this opportunity to get ahead—working longer hours, having fewer children, and buying more cars. On the other hand, older people missed the job security and sense of safety while walking down the streets that they remember from the “good old days.” And many less-educated young people who see the new system working against them joined angry and racist groups such as eastern Germany’s skinheads. Now well into the 21st century, more of capitalism’s realities, limits, and frustrations are sinking in.
I remember visits to the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Back then life was bleak, gray, and demoralizing because of ongoing political repression and their unresponsive Soviet-style command economy. Someone would dictate how many of these and how much of that would be produced, ignoring the basic
laws of supply and demand. It was a fiasco. On my early visits to Poland, people were taking their windshield wipers in with them at night. That’s because the government under-produced wipers, demand exceeded supply, and the thieves knew it. They’d rip off somebody’s wipers and sell them for a fortune on the black market. Today, there are plenty of wipers produced and distributed to meet the demand, and people are leaving their wipers on the car all night long in Warsaw.
Eastern Europe is enjoying freedom and a new affluence.
But Eastern Europe has put itself on a fast track to catch up with the West. In fact, people in most countries we’d identify as “Eastern Europe” insist on being called “Central Europeans”—a name that’s both politically and geographically correct. For better or for worse, mobile phones and McDonalds are every bit as entrenched here as anywhere in Europe. And for me, each visit is a case study in the fundamental wisdom of free enterprise and the laws of supply and demand.
Europe is burdened with the image of a too-politically-correct bureaucracy, notorious for dictating the proper curve of a cucumber in 24 official languages. But they don’t mind the teasing. While attempting to honor the linguistic and idealistic wishes of its unruly gang of members isn’t always efficient, Europe understands that watching out for its ethnic underdogs is essential for maintaining its hard-won peace.
Planting People Brings a Painful Harvest
In some cases, minority groups didn’t wind up where they are by choice, but were “planted” by governments. While the world is filled with struggling minority groups who stand in solidarity with each other, groups of people sent as settlers by dominant cultures to establish their control over disputed land also have hardships and feel a related solidarity for each other. For instance, I saw Israeli flags flying from flagpoles in Protestant communities all over Northern Ireland. Ulster and Israeli settlers empathize with each other. Protestants “planted” in the 17th century by a bigger power (England) in Ulster are having a tough time with their indigenous neighbors. And Israeli settlers I met in the West Bank, planted by their government in Palestinian territory, are struggling to exist with their indigenous neighbors as well.
Israeli flags fly next to the Union Jack in Northern Ireland, because settlers empathize with each other’s struggles.
This is a story repeated time and again through history. During difficult times, military families from Soviet Russia retired in relative comfort in little Estonia. Today Estonia—now independent—struggles with a big Russian minority that refuses to integrate.
In the 16th century, the Habsburg monarchy planted Serbs—who were escaping from the Ottomans farther south—along the Croatian-Bosnian border, to provide a “human shield” against those same Ottomans. Many centuries later, descendants of those Serb settlers and the indigenous Croats were embroiled in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Back when Britain ruled Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and used it as a big tea plantation, they couldn’t get the local Sinhalese to pick the tea cheaply enough, so they imported Tamils from India (who were more desperate and willing to work for less). When colonial rule became more trouble than the tea was worth, the Brits gave the island its freedom. But, thanks to England’s love of tea, the Sinhalese and Tamils found themselves locked in a tragic, 26-year-long civil war.
When I consider the problems that come with planting Israelis in Palestine, Protestants in Ireland, Russians in Estonia, Serbs in Croatia, and Tamils in Sinhalese Sri Lanka, I’m impressed both by the spine of the people who were there first and the hardship borne by the ancestors of the original settlers. When observing this sort of sectarian strife, travelers see that when people from one land displace others from their historic homeland—regardless of the rationale or justification—a harsh lesson is learned. Too often the resulting pain (which can last for so many centuries that many even forget its roots) is far greater for all involved than the short-term gain for the powers doing the planting.
European Challenges: An Aging Continent Grapples with Immigration
I am a Europhile. I freely admit I have a romantic fascination with Europe and an appreciation for its way of life. But I’m not blind to the fact that Europe has its character flaws and is grappling—not always very well—with some serious challenges of its own. I’ve written glowingly about Europe’s bold implementation of socialism, but tough times in the late 2000s and early 2010s clearly demonstrated that Europe isn’t immune to global economic crises. I’m certainly not an economist. But here’s my take on the situation from a travel writer’s perspective.
For a long time, both the US and Europe have been consuming more goods than we’ve produced. We import more than we export—and things finally caught up with us. Through the first decade of the 2000s, it seems that everybody overspent: The United States overspent on military endeavors and tax cuts, Europe overspent on infrastructure and entitlements, and individuals in both places committed to mortgages they couldn’t really afford. By riding wild real-estate bubbles and creating an economy designed to generate profit by rearranging the furniture without producing anything, we conned ourselves into thinking we were wealthier than we actually were. In the fall of 2008, it quickly became clear that the world economy had been living on borrowed time.
The resulting Great Recession hit people hard on both sides of the Atlantic. Some American conservatives tried to blame Europe’s economic woes on its “high taxes, big government” model. But if anything, Europe’s financial troubles resulted from aggressively capitalistic business models imported from America. In short, Ireland’s economy went downhill because of a good ol’ American-style housing bubble…not because they have universal healthcare, or because Germany built them freeways.
The collapse of the housing bubble, the huge financial hit of bailing out troubled banks, and the incalculable expense of other corporate malfeasance devastated European economies—making it even more challenging for them to finance their generous entitlements.
Further complicating matters are Europe’s shifting population demographics. Europe’s luxurious cradle-to-grave welfare system was conceived in a postwar society with lots of people working, fewer living to retirement, and those living beyond retirement having a short life span. The success of Europe’s social system has helped make the continent better educated and wealthier. But when that happens anywhere, it has two results: People live longer and have fewer children. And so, the demographic makeup of Europe has flipped upside-down: relatively few people working, lots of people retiring, and those who are retired living a long time. Europe is becoming a geriatric continent. The arithmetic just isn’t there to sustain the lavish entitlements Europeans have come to expect.
As in the USA, it’s difficult to take away expected entitlements without a fight. Politicians in Europe have the unenviable task of explaining to their citizens that they won’t get the cushy golden years their parents got. People who worked diligently with the promise of retiring at 62 are now told they’ll need to work an extra decade—and even then, they may not have a generous retirement waiting for them.
I expect you’ll see lots of marches and lots of strikes in Europe in the coming years as they try to recalibrate their economy.
When European workers lose entitlements, they hit the streets.
Europeans demonstrate: It’s in their blood and a healthy part of their democracy. When frustrated and needing to vent grievances, they hit the streets. I’ve been caught up in huge and boisterous marches all over Europe, and it’s not scary; in fact, it’s kind of exhilarating. “La Manifestation!” as they say in France. All that marching is just too much trouble for many Americans. When dealing with similar frustrations, we find a website or a TV station (on the left or right) that affirms our beliefs…and then shake our collective fists vigorously.
Interestingly, as Europe’s native population declines, its population growth may come largely from immigrants. And Europe’s immigration challenges are muc
h like America’s. Around the world, rich nations import poor immigrants to do their dirty work. If a society doesn’t want to pay for expensive apples picked by rich kids at high wages, it gets cheaper apples by hiring people willing to work for less. If you’re wealthy enough to hire an immigrant to clean your house, you do it—you get a clean house, and the immigrant earns a wage. That’s just the honest reality of capitalism.
In Europe, Gastarbeiter—German for “guest worker”—is the generic term for this situation because Germans so famously imported Turkish people to do their scut work a generation ago, when Germany’s post-WWII economic boom finally kicked into gear. These days, virtually every country in Western Europe has its own Gastarbeiter contingent. Berlin—with over 200,000 Turks—could be considered a sizable “Turkish city.” France’s population includes millions of poor North Africans. And even Ireland—after its recent “Celtic Tiger” boom time—now has 120,000 Polish people taking out its trash. It’s striking to hear my Irish friends speak about their new Polish worker as if he or she were a new appliance.
The Tyranny of the Majority
Once, while riding the bus from Munich out to Dachau, I learned a lesson about the tyranny of the majority. En route to the infamous concentration camp memorial, I sat next to an old German woman. I smiled at her weakly as if to say, “I don’t hold your people’s genocidal atrocities against you.” She glanced at me and sneered down at my camera. Suddenly, surprising me with her crusty but fluent English, she ripped into me. “You tourists come here not to learn, but to hate,” she seethed.
