Europe: East vs. West, or North vs. South?

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  09.07.10 | 4:21 PM ET

Anne Applebaum thinks the continent’s axis is changing, from the East-West divide of the Cold War era to a new, and more fluid, North-South split. She writes in Slate:

North and South: Not everybody is going to like that concept, especially not the new South, some of whose members are not necessarily in the southern half of the continent. For these are not geographical designations, but political terms of art. The South contains all those countries whose political classes have not been able to balance their national budgets, whose bureaucrats have not been able to reduce their numbers, whose voters have not learned to approve of austerity: Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and—at the moment—Ireland.

The North contains the budget hawks: Germany, Poland, Estonia, Scandinavia, the Czechs, and the Slovaks. Britain’s new government, with its austerity budget, aims to return to the North, following its recent experience of life in the South. France floats somewhere in between. Wealth, as such, isn’t northern: Much of the South is very rich. But in the North, private wealth has grown more or less in tandem with the public sector. Private wealth and public squalor are more typical of the South.

Tags: Nation Branding, Politics, Europe, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


1 Comment for Europe: East vs. West, or North vs. South?

leonides 10.20.10 | 1:09 PM ET

this is true, the cultural background of the south has to do with it, inheritance customs (more than in the north) roman and Arab ...

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.