Europe’s real tourist trap
Because the continent gets so much attention without really trying, it struggles to understand how marginal it has become, and to respond.
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Venice has banned tour groups larger than 25 and charged a tourist entry fee to counter overtourism.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Janan Ganesh
This is the first century in several that Europe will not shape. Even the 20th one, the “American” one, played out on the continent’s World War battlefields and Cold War front line. The largest ideas, Einstein’s and Keynes’, 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.
