Europe-les-Bains?

 

 

I must admit to stumbling across this work completely by chance while meandering through online research. Early in 2012, a blogger and former student of Michail Maiatsky produced a report on his Russian-language teacher’s book, which was published in 2007 and rightly entitled Europe-les-Bains. In the blog he writes “A philosopher of Russian origin, the author strikes where you would least expect: proffering an audacious project, to say the least, for Europe which he supports by use of caustic tales. The project? Transforming the tired Europe we know into one giant park of bathing and culture – the tourism capital of the world.”

Le destin du touriste

Naturally I was intrigued; firstly, because it was the second creative piece that I had read in which tourism is used as a place to play with memory. The first is Rui Zink’s Le destin du touriste (2011) in which the author uses scathing black humour to decry the tourist-voyeurs in warring countries.

Above all, however, I was seduced because I myself have often responded only half-jokingly with the following remark when, after cultural routes conferences, people would question me on the future of tourism in Europe: “Given the deindustrialisation of Europe and the pool of tourists which China and India constitute, I am fairly certain that within 50 years, Europe will have become a top-quality theme park to which residents of economically strong countries will flock in order to relax and take in the superbly presented tangible heritage, which will be the basis for combined routes of slow tourism, while they sample the intangible heritage carefully recovered through slow food.”

Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia

A new Grand Tour?

I fear that this prediction has nothing utopian about it. What does Michail Maiatsky say? “Europe, with France leading the way, is in the process of becoming a four-star resort. No more factories, no more industry, no more workers, no more work but more and more people in a hurry nonetheless, and above all tourists of all nationalities infuriating the locals. Packed museums where people admire paintings on ‘melancholia’. A civilisation in complete ennui, which has not gotten over its past greatness and deplores the little Chinese people; a place where the politicians have lost their way, where they no longer know what to do with ‘young people’ and where the old folk are almost in the majority – giving full meaning to the expression ‘good old Europe’ – in short, where it is all sliding downhill. However, rather than bury one’s head in the sand, it is better to accept this change. Although it is assuredly the end of a chapter, it is not the end of the world. What prospects are there in this new balneo-cultural park? Having become idle, by either choice or constraint, Europeans will be able to work as guides for the visitors, but above all they will finally have time to take care of themselves, and fully savour the confusion and vagary of their fate.”

So that’s that, then.

On 16 December 2010, The Economist ran an article with the headline ‘A new Grand Tour: China’s tourists are carving out a new European itinerary, with some unexpected stops’. In it, we read that Europe leads the surveys on the favoured destinations of China’s middle class; some of the places which crop up the most often are the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Grand Canal in Venice. Oddly enough, however, the Chinese are also attracted to destinations which Europeans themselves would have trouble pointing to on a map, such as Luxembourg, Trier, Metzingen, Verona and mount Titlis (in the Swiss Alps). By all accounts, the Chinese tourist’s European Tour starts in France, “the country seen as offering all the essential European virtues: history, romance, luxury and quality.”

No arguments there! Yet I hope Luxembourg can forgive The Economist for this: “In Luxembourg the Chinese tourists pause just long enough to photograph the palace of its reigning grand duke. This pocket-sized country, with a population 3,000 times smaller than China’s, is admired for its national wealth per person (the highest in the world by some measure). It also allows Chinese tour groups to knock off another country with minimal effort, allowing for extra boasting back home.”

Translation Alisrair Cowie