Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Italy’s Mezzogiorno was no longer the only impoverished zone, as it had once been: most of Ireland; parts of Great Britain (Ulster, Wales, Scotland and the north and west of England); most of Greece and Portugal; southern, central and north-western Spain: all were poor and would need significant subsidies and reallocations of central aid if they were ever to catch up. In 1982, taking the European Community’s average income as 100, Denmark—the wealthiest member—stood at 126, Greece at just 44. By 1989 per capita GDP in Denmark was still more than twice that of Portugal (in the US, the gap between wealthy and poor states was only two-thirds as wide). And these were national averages—regional disparities were greater still. Even wealthy countries had deserving zones: when Sweden and Finland joined the Union in the mid 1990s, their Arctic regions, under-populated and totally dependent on maintenance grants and other subsidies from Stockholm and Helsinki, now qualified for assistance from Brussels too. To correct geographical and market deformations that locked Spain’s Galicia or Sweden’s Vasterbotten into dependency, agencies in Brussels would devote large amounts of cash—bringing undoubted local benefits but also setting up expensive, cumbersome and occasionally corrupt local bureaucracies in the process.26