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Asked by a reader what I miss about the UK, I say without thinking – and therefore sincerely – the proximity of other countries. After some reproach (“You weren’t so disoriented when the forms of naturalization occurred”), I realize I would have said the same thing if I had come from France or Germany. The nation is not the goal. The regional glories are.
This season, more than most, the European geographical concentration of sublime and different places tortures those who no longer have them. Copenhagen to try, San Sebastian to feed: I’ve only known Southeast Asia to compare in its density of wonders. For reference, a return flight from Washington to Los Angeles is an hour longer than a round trip from London to Rome.
This feature of European life is quite special. There is reason to think that it will become completely defining.
For most people, the future promises fewer and fewer air travel. The public health codes of the moment have little to do with it. If most or even many business trips succumb to Zoom, this is a valuable subsidy for missing economy class seats.
At the same time, except for some eureka moment in electric aviation, the green box for higher taxes on flights (or even direct sidewalks) will be created. It is inactive to speculate on the price of a transatlantic ticket in a decade. But if we fail to consider 2019 as the most democratic moment in the history of air travel, we will have to have a fantastic innovation in the coming years.
This is the best plausible scenario. Here’s the worst: the area they can cross without flying will limit everyone’s vacation options except the well-to-do, almost all the time. The variability and interest of one’s immediate region will be important in a way that has not been done since the dawn of the jet age.
It is at this point that Europe would stand out in the world. Yes, Brazil, America and India can claim as much internal autonomy (ethnic, topographical) as continents. The Indochina Peninsula is home to about 250 million people, and on Samuel Huntington’s provocative raw map, there are three civilizations.
Yet with 40 ish nations, nearly as many official languages, and half a billion people in an area of roughly American size, Europe is hard to match by pure stimulus compression. And this is before we adjust to its modes of non-air transport: meteoric trains, roads at the spiritual level, the navigation lanes of the North Sea, the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Only if the continent had a river the size of the Nile that crossed it could it be more suitable for a world of diminished air travel.
Mercifully, this regionalization of travel is not ordered. The still growing demand of the Asian middle class can change the economy of airlines as much as the loss of old business flyers. When it comes to eco-taxes and flight rationing, voters have a chance to talk about a good game until a destination of eternal permanence is set aside.
But if this is the way of the future, however, then a small continent full of treasures, lattice with rail and asphalt, will become a place of its own to live. And – I say it as an “Ode to Joy”, which is disturbing, this is true with or without EU membership.
What friction there is in post-Brexit excursions to the mainland is like nothing against raw proximity. Two and a half hours to Paris is two and a half hours to Paris. “A continent we will never leave,” is how Boris Johnson described Europe at the strangely poignant end to his resignation note as foreign secretary. What his point lacked in originality he noticed in geological truth.
In the end, unless air fares go wild, sharper travelers will save on other things. I’m just a green belt in vogue and would even give up a case or six of Pommard to feel the humid heat of Bangkok. It is more the broad middle class that will be rooted in increasingly expensive skies. Life in one region above others would offer them a kind of heartbreak. Against a winner who takes all the United States, modern Europe has often been sold as the best place to be normal. What was once strictly economic glory could become geographical.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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