by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
Last week I led a military-history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe\u2019s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.<\/p>\n
Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.<\/p>\n
Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and they make it nearly impossible to immigrate to their country.<\/p>\n
So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?<\/p>\n
To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is also somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages.<\/p>\n
Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 BC to AD 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later, to Renaissance Venice and Florence.<\/p>\n
Instead, culture explains far more \u2014 a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers should save and produce like workaholic Germans to even the playing field of the European Union.<\/p>\n
But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, by comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.<\/p>\n
I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard \u2014 but often accurate \u2014 politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.<\/p>\n
Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or do they scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 p.m.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?<\/p>\n
To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic \u2014 or is it characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism, and tribalism?<\/p>\n
The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money, or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.<\/p>\n
There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the post-modern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and that to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but we privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.<\/p>\n
A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek-island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany \u2014 and why they do not believe that they should have to \u2014 take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.<\/p>\n
\u00a92012 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Last week I led a military-history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe\u2019s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[194,216],"tags":[1058,1015,1050,149,107,315,1056,283],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-bK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":724,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/thoughts-on-the-rhine\/","url_meta":{"origin":728,"position":0},"title":"Thoughts on the Rhine","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Editor\u2019s note: Recently, VDH led a group on a tour of the Rhine and wrote these thoughts. Rhine Watching Kehl, Germany \u2014 I\u2019ve been making my way downstream the Rhine from Switzerland on the way to Amsterdam, leading a military history tour while observing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civilization"","block_context":{"text":"Civilization","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civilization\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":731,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-limits-of-german-patience\/","url_meta":{"origin":728,"position":1},"title":"The Limits of German Patience","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Cologne, Germany I\u2019m still in Germany, and keep noticing a predictable, but continually interesting, pattern in talking to Germans of all walks of life \u2014 tourists, hoteliers, guides, drivers, casual bystanders, or students. When Greece comes up (or rather is brought up by Americans),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Germany"","block_context":{"text":"Germany","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/germany\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13696,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eeyore-s-corner-from-hippies-to-yuppies-to-our-puppies\/","url_meta":{"origin":728,"position":2},"title":"Eeyore \u2019s Corner: From Hippies to Yuppies to Our Puppies","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 6, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers Part One: Hippiedom The Sixties were, as the late, great Peter Collier and the astute David Horowitz wrote, the work of a \u201cDestructive Generation.\u201d Some of the best minds of the conservative movement who lived through those wasted years chronicled their excesses\u2014the narcissism, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 14 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 14 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eeyore-s-corner-from-hippies-to-yuppies-to-our-puppies\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/HippiesWalking.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4028,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/collapse-of-a-hyperpower\/","url_meta":{"origin":728,"position":3},"title":"Collapse of a “Hyperpower”","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 9, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"A review of\u00a0The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians\u00a0by Peter Heather and\u00a0The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization\u00a0by Bryan Ward-Perkins. by Victor Davis Hanson The New Criterion After September 11 and the acrimonious war in Iraq, America was castigated as the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11213,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/europes-vanishing-calm\/","url_meta":{"origin":728,"position":4},"title":"Europe’s Vanishing Calm","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 7, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Europeans claim to be building a new democratic culture but the governing elites of the European Union consider voters little more than members of reckless mobs. AVIGNON, France\u00a0\u2014 The Rhone River Valley in southern France is a storybook marriage of high technology, traditional vineyards,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "France"","block_context":{"text":"France","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/france\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1587,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/history-returns-to-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":728,"position":5},"title":"History Returns to Europe","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Vienna\u00a0\u2014 Walk the beautiful streets in Munich, Strasbourg, and Vienna, and you can see why Europeans thought in the last decades that they had reached the end of history. There is not a soldier to be seen. 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