Europe’s fatal beauty

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":4.4,"text":"Is Copenhagen the best city in the world with fewer than a million people? Or is that Lisbon? Being one of life’s rankers — a word which the editor of this column must take some care over — I regret that recent visits have failed to settle the question. For a pedestrian, the choice is stark: the Nordic clarity of wide geometric streets versus the mystery of always rounding a tight corner. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is nice to have within a 45-minute train ride. But so is Cascais. Lisbon wins on weather but a Copenhagen summer feels buzzier for being so fleeting. Readers will suggest other cities of that approximate size. Except for a Vancouver here and there, all will be European. "}],[{"start":46.8,"text":"These radiant few months have brought home how hard the continent is to beat, or even seriously rival, as a place to live. But life wouldn’t be life if there were not a cost to all the beauty. And the cost is a lot of enemies."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":62.349999999999994,"text":"Hostility to Europe is so often bound up with intense attraction to it. At consecutive Munich Security Conferences, the Trump administration guest has slammed Europe for not guarding its civilisation against migrants and liberals. Notice the implicit compliment here. Maga despises Europe in part because it is so good. Whether or not it is betraying its inheritance, it has an inheritance to betray."}],[{"start":88.3,"text":"Marco Rubio, while knocking his hosts, even referred to the US as a “child of Europe”. This is sweet of him but, if the result of his admiration is to be frequent scolding and electoral meddling, Europeans would be better off if he had no interest in us at all. That is never an option for Europe, though. Increasingly, the continent has the worst of all worlds: none of the influence of a superpower, but all of the incoming scrutiny. A less beautiful place would at least be left to decline in peace."}],[{"start":119.05,"text":"If Maga was the scariest provider of this love-hate, Europeans could relax a bit. There is no prospect of an armed attack from that quarter, “just” tariffs and an occasional thumb on the electoral scales in Germany or France. There is also a droll side to it all: Londoners having to defend their city against people who don’t even live in the most interesting bit of south-eastern Florida."}],[{"start":143.1,"text":"But it gets worse than Maga. The least-wanted attention of all that Europe receives is from the east, not the west. And again the very attractiveness of the continent is partly the issue. We are four and a half years into the Ukraine war but centuries into Russia’s complex relationship with Europe, which it views as a threat and a model at different times, and often concurrently. Whether to emulate the liberal modernity of Europe, or recoil from it, or take the modernity but leave the liberalism, has long split Moscow. (Or St Petersburg. That the cities have switched as capitals attests to the ambivalence)."}],[{"start":183.64999999999998,"text":"It wouldn’t be such a raw issue if Europe were not so seductive. London and the south of France stand condemned for having hosted Kremlin-friendly individuals until the Ukraine war made it unconscionable. Less is said about the desire of those people to be in those places in the first place. To this day, Europhobic propaganda is frightening but also itself laced with fear. It is a fear that democratic Europe is so beguiling as to make what remains of the post-Soviet “near abroad” want to tilt that way over time. A less attractive continent would not have to worry about this round-the-clock abuse."}],[{"start":219.49999999999997,"text":"Can Europeans have it both ways? Can they enjoy a continent like this — not just a grand place, but a grand idea — and not expect it to be triggering to other sensibilities? "}],[{"start":230.79999999999998,"text":"From the Louisiana sculpture garden, Sweden is visible but it is an unseen presence farther east that weighs on the atmosphere. What a treat, and what a risk, to inhabit a continent of all too provocative splendour. "}],[{"start":250.25,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1787394294_8334.mp3"}