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The acronym was cruel enough. More than a decade ago, as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain fought to prove their creditworthiness to a doubtful world, the term “PIGS” caught on. But it was an innocuous-sounding phrase, “the periphery”, that really hurt, like calling Poland “eastern” Europe. (Or Hampstead a “suburb”.) For millennia, the Mediterranean world viewed most of what happened north of the Alps as incidental, if not barbarous. How stinging to have that condescension reversed.
A revenge of sorts is being had. Spain was the world’s best-performing rich nation in 2024, judged The Economist. Greece was borrowing as cheaply as France towards the end of the same year. Foreign delegations now trouble the political class in Athens for clues about how to do painful, fruitful reform. Portugal has been growing faster than Germany since before the pandemic.
Economic numbers will toggle up and down. What won’t change, I sense, is the gradual southward drift of political power in the continent. The only European head of government at Donald Trump’s inauguration was Giorgia Meloni. There is more to this than one woman’s opportunism, or the fact that Britain, France and Germany are led by wounded animals right now. After Brexit, space naturally opened up for another large nation to assert itself in the EU. Of the obvious candidates — Poland, Spain and Italy — two are Mediterranean.
Even the largest problem facing southern Europe, its exposure to irregular migration across the sea, is a kind of leverage. The rest of the continent will have to incentivise the likes of Italy to not wave arrivals northward. (The EU has a similar arrangement with Turkey.) The continent’s southern frontier now has a strategic value that was hard to picture at the EU’s founding. Given the respective birth rates of Africa and Europe, the intermittent chaos of the Sahel, it will grow, not wane.
And even this doesn’t get to the root of the Med’s rising clout. In an ageing, low-growth continent, the trick is to tap into more dynamic parts of the world. It matters, therefore, which countries have historic and linguistic ties to where. Madrid now rivals Miami as the home-from-home for capital and talent from Spanish-speaking Latin America. Whether Lisbon has the scale to act as a similar conduit for Brazilians, we’ll see, but the basic Lusophone link is there.
It is the northern EU, through historical accident, that looks less and less like the coming world. There is no French- or Dutch- or German-speaking superpower on the horizon, unless Madagascar gets a move on. With the rise of Spanish (which has toppled French as the most-studied language at A-level in Britain, never mind globally), my sense of where in Europe feels parochial, and where seems a bridge to elsewhere, has changed over the course of my adult life.
When Marco Polo went to China, he interpreted it as two worlds, such was the difference between north (“Cathay”) and south (“Manji”). In India, the languages spoken, the incomes earned and the votes cast change profoundly as the wide Gangetic Plain tapers southward. Americans fought a civil war along a more or less latitudinal frontier. Any large body of inhabited land is prone to a north-south rift (think of Nigeria), often rooted in such hard factors as average temperature and staple crop. Europe’s is slight. As almost all of the continent is high-income, majority Christian and tightly packed, I maintain that it is, by world standards, one country.
But this must have made northern condescension all the more galling. It still exists. A fear among Britain’s elites is that the country “becomes Italy”, as though no worse fate could befall a people. Well, sweeping theories about the unreformable south, a lovely place for a weekend farmhouse and not much else, look quaint now. And while the economic gains since 2010 can be overdone, the strategic trends that are empowering the Med can pass without notice. The future of the continent will be decided to a large extent south of the 45th parallel, as was its deep past. Who are you calling peripheral?
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