Eurosclerosis?

A couple of weeks drifting down the great rivers of Europe can be quite educational. For instance, who knew that river cruising would be such hard work? It may sound like an excuse for geezers to lounge around getting sozzled, but in truth the daily shore excursions involve endless amounts of walking. When we finally disembarked, I felt like I'd walked all the way from Amsterdam to Budapest.

Or consider these numbers.  There are now almost 300 cruise ships plying these rivers.  At the start of the century there were barely a dozen.  And these things are huge -- most of them 135 meters long -- so the congestion in the major ports is starting to become an issue.  The night we were in Regensburg, a smallish city in Bavaria, ours was one of 25 cruise ships in port!  Then there are the 68 locks to be traversed between the North Sea and Budapest, including a couple where the vertical drop is 81 feet!

All trivia aside, though, a leisurely cruise through Europe provides plenty of time for recording anecdotal impressions of the state of the continent. The well-worn media view is that Europe is stuck in a deep rut: just last week, Jeremy Warner told his readers at the Daily Telegraph that Europe's sluggishness was the sole factor holding back the global economy.  Well, maybe things are still bad in the EU's southern tier, and France seems unable to escape its role as the Europe's current "sick man", but there's more to the story than that.

Germany, for one, seems to be doing just fine. One interesting surprise is that its industrial sector doesn't seem to have suffered the hollowing-out that has affected so many other developed economies. I'm not just talking about VW or BMW or Siemens here: the northern stretches of the Rhine are still alive with industrial activity, much of it directly related to the bustling commerce of the river itself: shipyards, drydocks and such. Just about all of those 300 cruise ships were built in Germany -- what other industrialized country remains competitive in that particular sector?

Then there's eastern Europe.  The big success story here is Poland, but other former communist countries are also transforming rapidly.  Budapest's role as a major imperial capital ended just about a century ago, but it's now recovering much of its former glory. (The politics, alas, is another matter, with neo-fascists aplenty and a level of corruption that, as our tour guide put it, can be seen from outer space). Or consider little Slovakia, home to three car manufacturing plants and a burgeoning high-tech sector.  The unemployment rate in the capital, Bratislava, is only 2 percent.

Not all doom and gloom, in short, and one place where the transformation has been noticed is, of course, Ukraine.  The good folks in Kyiv, Lviv and other cities in the west of that country quite naturally want some of what their near neighbours have -- not for nothing was the main locus of the uprising that began last year christened "Euromaidan".  But there's a problem with Ukraine's push for closer ties with the EU, and I don't just mean Vladimir Putin.  Even as new Ukrainian President Poroshenko rushed to sign a trade deal with the EU, the country's business community was openly alarmed at the prospect of suddenly facing a flood of tariff-free imports from the west.

That unease is even greater in the east of Ukraine, where the separatist struggle is still ongoing.  The Donbass region is the home of most of Ukraine's heavy industry, which has only been kept afloat over the past two decades by the willingness of Russia to continue buying its generally uncompetitive products. If the pro-Russian revolt is defeated -- which looks the way to bet, barring direct military intervention from Moscow -- it seems unlikely that Russia will continue to support those industries.  There's also little sign that Russia will be shipping more gas to Ukraine any time soon -- and winter is just a few months away.  Ukraine may share borders with both Hungary and Slovakia, but it's not going to find it easy to match those countries' economic advances, no matter how much the EU tries to help.