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The acronym was cruel enough. More than a decade ago, while Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain struggled to prove their credit ability to a dubious world, a caught expression of “pigs”. But it was a harmless sound phrase, a “periphery”, which was truly injured, like the name of Poland “Eastern” Europe. (Or Hampsestead “suburb.”) The Millennium are the Mediterranean world for the majority of what happened to the north of the Alps as accidentally, if not barbarn. How to stab that this pity be revealed.
Revenge. Spain in 2024 was the best nation in the world, judging The Economist. Greece borrowed as cheap as France at the end of the same year. Foreign delegations are now problematizing the political class in Athens because of traces of how to make painful, fertile reform. Portugal grows faster than Germany than before the pandemic.
Economic numbers will move up and down. What I feel will not change is the gradual slope of political power on the continent. The only European government chief in Donald Trump’s inauguration was Giorgia Meloni. There are more than one woman about this, or the fact that Britain, France and Germany run the wounded animals at the moment. After Brexit, the space naturally opened for another large nation to claim in the EU. Of the obvious candidates – Poland, Spain and Italy – are two Mediterranean.
Even the biggest problem facing southern Europe, its exposure to irregular migration across the sea, is a kind of influence. The rest of the continent will have to stimulate similar Italy not to wave arrival north. (The EU has a similar arrangement with Turkish.) The southern border of the continent now has a strategic value that was difficult to imagine when establishing EU. Considering the adequate birth rate of Africa and Europe, the occasional chaos of Sahel, it will grow, not vicious.
Even this does not reach the root of the Med’s Rising Clut. On the older continent of low growth, the trick is to use more dynamic parts of the world. Therefore, it is important which countries have historical and linguistic connections where. Madrid is now subjugated by Miami as at a capital home and a Latin America talent that speaks Spanish. Does Lisbon have a scale that it acts like a similar channel for Brazilians, we will see, but the basic lusophone connection is there.
Through a historical accident, the Northern EU is less and less like the world to come. There is no French or Dutch or German language on the horizon unless Madagascar moves on. With the rise of Spanish (which overthrew French as the most respected language in A-Razin in Britain, it has nothing to do with globally), my feeling where it feels parochial in Europe and where the bridge is done elsewhere, has changed during my adult life course.
When Marco Polo went to China, he interpreted him as two worlds, such was the difference between the north (“Cathay”) and South (“smaller”). In India, spoken languages, earned revenues and voices are given deeply changing as the wide ganghetic plain narrows in the south. The Americans fought against the civil war along more or less geographical borders. Any large body of a populated country is prone to a lavish north (think of Nigeria), often rooted in hard factors such as average temperature and crop. The European is insignificant. Since almost all continent is high revenue, the majority Christian and firmly full, I claim that, according to world standards, it is one country.
But it is certain that the north was lowered. It still exists. The fear among the British elites is that the country “become Italy”, as if no worse fate could be hit by the people. Well, pure theories about the non -formable south, a beautiful place for the weekend farmhouse and not much, look strange. While economic gains from 2010 can be overdo it, strategic trends that strengthen honey can pass without an announcement. The future of the continent will be decided to largely south of 45. Parallel, as well as its deep past. Who are you calling peripheral?
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