Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on ‘The Little West’)

“[T]he the last meaningful multinational alliance [is] a ‘Little West’ consisting of Europe, including Brexit Britain but minus Hungary, plus Canada. The Little West is a herbivorous but surprisingly solid bloc, terrified into co-operation by outside threats….The Little West has an ideology of sorts, probably shared by a slight majority of its citizens: democracy, individual freedoms and nostalgia for the old order. The other powers have no belief system beyond an all-purpose aggressive nationalism. China's Communist party isn't communist, and Russian and American action bounces around according to the personal whims of Vladimir Putin and [Donald] Trump.”— Columnist Simon Kuper, “A New World Disorder,” The Financial Times, Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 2026

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Climate Change’s Impact on European Summers)

“Since the heatwaves of 2019, summer has morphed from something to crave into something to fear. Europe, which is heating twice as fast as the global average, had its hottest ever summer in 2022, breaking the record set in 2021 — all of which was before the world re-entered the hotter El Niño climate cycle. No beach is fun at 40C with wildfires on the horizon.”—Journalist Simon Kuper, “How Will Climate Change Affect the Holiday Map?” The Financial Times, July 1-2, 2023

Will this go down as the summer when Planet Earth finally awakens to the threat of climate change, when voters finally demand that politicians stop denying its existence and start spelling out what they’ll do about it?

If only!

Even so, it is remarkable the extent to which there are few places on this planet—and, more to the point, few places in the United States—that are not affected by the rising heat and humidity. Statistics don’t persuade people of much, but maybe TV footage of relatives—or, God forbid, direct experience with the consequences of a climate in the midst of a perfect storm of factors—might convince some.

At some point, I’d like to write an analysis that, jigsaw-like, puts all the pieces of together from different parts of the globe to depict what’s happening. But Simon Kuper’s recent column that I quoted from above illuminates, in concise form, what is happening in Europe.

I didn’t know until I read him, for instance, that a particularly popular European pastime—sunbathing on the French Riviera—was invented 100 years ago this summer by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for the expatriate couple at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.

Nor, until I read Kuper, had I thought of how unbearable temperatures could alter European tourism patterns—and have a direct (and more often than not, unhappy) effect on this element of the continent’s economy.

The image accompanying this post is based on a 2022 European Investment Bank survey, showing an even wider implication of climate change: that more than a quarter of Europeans believe they may need to move to another region because of the phenomenon.

From my childhood, I distinctly recall a margarine commercial with the tagline, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” But for at least the past couple of decades, in our refusal to face up to climate change, Americans have been the fools, not the other way around. 

Maybe now, as we survey the damage, we can only hope that clown time is over.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on Europe on Edge, 100 Years Ago)

“It was a spring afternoon in that year of grace 19-, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months.” — German novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Death in Venice (1911)

It might be more appropriate for today’s “menace”—nationalism/fascism revived—to appear while we wait for the cold of winter to arrive…

This Day in Economic History (Euro Debuts, to Premature Hoopla)

January 4, 1999—The euro, backed by 11 European countries, debuted, fueling the dream not merely of a common continental currency but even of a common continental economy that could compete against the United States.

There hadn’t been a common currency in Europe since the days of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, back at the start of the ninth century. We all know how that ended. Now, even with 17 nations using the currency, the euro has had its own struggles, as can be seen by turning to almost any newspaper with any kind of international coverage. (If you really want the major milestones for the euro crisis, this dandy timeline will do nicely.)

“Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency,” wrote Amity Shlaes in a Bloomberg News article from 2010.

What Ms. Schlaes is talking about can be seen even in the deliberations that brought about the pact. Germany, still fearful of the hyperinflation that doomed the Weimar Republic and helped bring on Nazism, wanted to call the treaty a “Stability Pact.” The leaders of France, balefully eyeing the prospects of putting that before their voters, pushed to have it called a “Growth Pact.” In one of those compromises that make political economy what it is (i.e., essentially meaningless), the agreement hammered out at a quarrelsome summit meeting in 1996 ended up calling it “the Stability and Growth Pact.”

(That meeting, by the way, took place in Dublin Castle. Ireland has had reason to question its relationship to the International Monetary Fund following the extreme austerity imposed as part of a bailout program designed to remedy their pell-mell struggle for—take a bow, France!—“growth.”)

It just goes to show that reality—or, at least, reality in the form of the traditional nation-state—is bound to rear its head against any economic theory.

Quote of the Day (Calvin Trillin, on Visitors Returning From Europe)

“I am an absolutist on the First Amendment, except for people who show slides of their trip to Europe. They should be arrested. If they can’t be held, they can at least be knocked about a bit at the station house.”-- Calvin Trillin, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

 
(Photo of Calvin Trillin taken at a discussion at Dartmouth College, February 2011

Quote of the Day (Christopher Clausen, on Islam and Secularization)

“One reason Muslim immigrants may have an easier time integrating into American society is that piety of almost any sort is so much more common and accepted here than in Europe. The complete secularization many intellectuals have been yearning for since the Enlightenment, now nearly achieved in Europe, turns out to bring its own set of unexpected problems. Although George Washington would no doubt be disappointed, an American future of emotional, never-quite-settled conflicts over the place of faith in public life looks like an acceptable price to pay for avoiding the far greater evils that afflict both the devout and godless regions of the earth.”— Christopher Clausen, “America's Design for Tolerance,” The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2007