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The acronym was quite cruel. More than a decade ago, as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain fought to prove their credibility to a suspicious world, the term “pigs” caught. But it was an innocent phrase, the “suburbs”, which really damaged, how to call Europe’s “eastern” Poland. (Or Hampstead a “suburban”.) For millennia, the Mediterranean world looked at most of what happened north of the Alps as casual, if not barbarian. How strong to return that condensation.
Yes there is a revenge of species. Spain was the world -rich nation in the world in 2024, the economist judged. Greece was lending as cheap as France to the end of the same year. Foreign delegations now disturb the political class in Athens about data on how to make a painful, fruitful reform. Portugal has grown faster than Germany since pandemia.
Economic numbers will change up and down. What will not change, I think, is the gradual shift of political power on the continent. The only European government leader in the inauguration of Donald Trump was Giorgia Meloni. There is more to this than a woman’s opportunism, or the fact that Britain, France and Germany are run by animals now injured. After Brexit, the space was naturally opened for another great nation to assert itself in the EU. Of the visible candidates – Poland, Spain and Italy – two are Mediterranean.
Even the biggest problem faced by Southern Europe, its exposure to irregular migration across the sea is a kind of lever. The rest of the continent will have to stimulate Italy’s likes not to shake the arrivals north. (The EU has a similar arrangement with Turkey.) The continent’s southern border now has a strategic value that was difficult to photograph at the EU foundation. Given the relevant levels of the births of Africa and Europe, Sahel’s permanent chaos will increase, not faded.
And that too does not reach the root of growing Medi’s growth. In an aging, low -rise continent, the fraud is to get into the world’s most dynamic parts. Therefore, it is important which countries have historical and linguistic links where. Madrid now rivals Miami as home-home for capital and talent from Latin American speaking Spanish. Whether Lisbon has the scale to act as a similar channel for the Brazilians, we will see it, but Lusophone’s basic connection is there.
The northern EU, through the historical accident, which looks less and less like the next world. There is no French or Dutch or German superpower that speaks on the horizon unless Madagascar takes a move. With the rise of the Spanish (which has overthrown French as the most studied language at level A in Britain, never remember it globally), my feeling where in Europe it feels parochial, and where it seems a bridge for somewhere else, has changed long course of my adult life.
When Marco Polo went to China, he interpreted it as two worlds, such was the difference between the north (“Cathay”) and the south (“Manji”). In India, spoken languages, earnings earned and votes threw deeply while Tapers Wide Gangetic Plain in the south. Americans fought a civil war along a more or less latitudinal border. Anydo a large body of residential soil is prone to a north-south crack (think of nigerine), often rooted in such difficult factors as average temperature and main crops. Europe is small. While almost the entire continent is high -income, a Christian majority and firmly filled, I claim to be, according to world standards, a place.
But this must have made northern condensation even more unclear. It still exists. A fear among Britain’s elites is that the country “becomes Italy”, as if no bad luck could fall a people. Well, comprehensive theory for the independent south, a beautiful place for a weekend farm house and not much more, look weird now. And while economic profits have been excessive since 2010, strategic trends that are empowering Med can pass without notice. The future of the continent will be largely placed south of the 45th parallel, as was its deep past. Who are you calling it peripheral?
Janan.gans@ft.com
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