The decline of Europe

The current economic crisis may be a moment when the living standards in the "rich" countries fall drastically, and the emerging markets gain relative wealth.

For Europe there is one thing that always could have remained a source of income, however, and that is tourism. There is only one Toledo, one London, one Mont Saint-Michel and one Sacra di San Michele in the world.

Thousands of European towns and cities are potential tourist destinations for the rapidly increasing number of tourists from China, India and the rest of the world.

However, many towns have torn down reasonably old buildings and replaced them with new concrete structures. There are concrete structures all over the world - many of them nice. The ones built today in China and Malaysia are not in any way less impressive than the European ones.

The old cities however, the architecture of the early 20th century and older, that is something that is virtually unique to Europe. There are of course small pockets of old European style architecture elsewhere, but nowhere is there such an impressive accumulation, as there used to be in Europe.

Now, after two bloody unnecessary world wars and vast amounts of bad city planning, there is not much left in Europe either, limiting even tourism as a potential source of income.