Has Europe Become Disneyland?

Irony of ironies, the leaders of the G7 nations are almost all wildly unpopular in their nations. The only exception was the prime minister of host country Italy. That would be Georgia Meloni, often denounced for being to the right of right.

Axios reports on the approval ratings of the leaders:

Biden's 37% approval rating positively sparkles next to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau (30%), German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (25%), U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (25%), French President Emmanuel Macron (21%) and Japanese PM Fumio Kishida (13%), per Morning Consult's tracker.

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Sunak looks almost certain to lose his job in elections on July 4. In the European Parliament elections, Scholz's party finished a distant third behind the far-right, while Macron's performed so badly that he called a shock snap election.

Leaving Japan to the side, the political parties represented by these wildly unpopular leaders look like they are going to suffer some serious electoral defeats. Such was the case in the recent elections to the European parliament. Anyone who thinks that their parties will bounce back in the upcoming elections has been smoking the wrong cigarettes.

Leaders from the left, like Macron and Scholz are not doing well. But then again, the conservative British Tory Party is about to suffer a significant electoral defeat.

One remarks, a propos of nothing in particular, that Europe seems to be in a throw-the-bums-out mood. Meloni excepted, incumbents seem to be an endangered species.

One notes that the elections to the European parliament represented a vote of no confidence both in the Green Party save-the-planet mania, the Merkelian thrust toward open borders, and the war in Ukraine. 

Moreover, militarily, Europe depends on American power. The welfare states of that continent could not defend themselves without the American military. Weak and dependent are not sources of pride. Weak and dependent does not encourage Europe.

In the meantime, consider another thesis. The G7 this year was something of a nostalgia trip. It recalled a time when Western European nations were world leaders. And it posed the question of whether or not this is still the case.

So asked Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times yesterday.

This is the first cen­tury in sev­eral that Europe won’t shape. Even the 20th one, the “Amer­ican” one, played out on the con­tin­ent’s world war bat­tle­fields and cold war front­line. The largest ideas, Ein­stein’s and Keynes’s, 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 bunch under the name Mod­ern­ism. European states had colon­ies well into the second half of the cen­tury, which brought dis­credit, but also clout.

All of which makes our present impot­ence sting a bit. Europe has a lack of major tech com­pan­ies, a reduced share of world out­put and, as pro­tec­tion­ism spreads, no hope of match­ing Amer­ican or Chinese lar­gesse on domestic indus­tries. In a trad­ing world, Europe had one super­power, the “Brus­sels effect”, by which EU reg­u­la­tions became the de facto global stand­ard. The frag­ment­a­tion of trade could deprive Europe of even that vote on the shape of the future.

This is not a very encouraging picture. Ganesh continues, pointing out, that Europe is no longer where the action is, but it remains everyone’s favorite playground. And it still leads the world in luxury goods. If that is your idea of a consolation prize, good for you.

Ganesh calls Europe the: “glamour continent.”

 If a regime wants to sportswash itself, it acquires Paris Saint-Ger­main, not the Lakers. If a Chinese rural-dweller wants to advert­ise their ascent into urban afflu­ence, LVMH products, not the US equi­val­ents, are de rigueur. Europe should never shrink from these strengths. It would be crack­ers not to mon­et­ise its own prestige. But such mas­tery of the “soft” stuff might blind it to what is afoot in tech and other harder realms. The danger is that Europe becomes the geo­stra­tegic equi­val­ent of a per­son too beau­ti­ful to ever need do or say any­thing inter­est­ing. It can be flattered into not noti­cing that the cen­tury is being authored else­where.

Being a tourist destination does not make up for the continent’s failings. Being a tourist destination does not change the fact that the continent has been overrun by migrants, what with their criminal gangs and refusal to assimilate. That is, to adopt the cultural habits of a sinking ship.

For his part Ganesh emphasizes the tourism aspect:

No, the “blight” of tour­ism isn’t, or isn’t just, envir­on­mental. It is men­tal. It saps a place’s incent­ive to mod­ern­ise. It rewards ossi­fic­a­tion. For a long time, the­or­ies have cir­cu­lated as to why mar­ket reforms are so dif­fi­cult to enact in Medi­ter­ranean Europe in par­tic­u­lar. These include: some col­lect­iv­ist ethos in Cath­oli­cism (but then how to explain busi­ness­like Bav­aria?), weather so good as to induce a taste for leis­ure (what about Aus­tralia?) and high expect­a­tions of the wel­fare state (unlike Scand­inavia?).

None of these explan­a­tions check out, quite. But it mat­ters that south­ern Europe can get a lot wrong in policy terms and still expect to be pat­ron­ised, in at least one sense of that word, by out­siders bear­ing not just hard cur­rency but ego­boost­ing atten­tion. What an exor­bit­ant priv­ilege. And what a nice way to decline.

When your continent becomes a great tourist destination it has overcome the work ethic. Because enjoying leisure is not the same thing as working for a living. The hard-working Asians who want to enjoy the fruits of their success seem to be drawn to Europe.

Does this mean that modern Europe has become a continent-wide Disneyland? Think about it?

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