The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 49
northern. Fans of France’s far north praise
the locals as generous, earthy and plain
spoken. But the landscape is often bleak,
with rundown industrial towns and
seemingly deserted villages of grey houses
with closed shutters. Head farther into
France, past central regions called snooty
though prosperous, and the lavender fields
and hillside olive groves of the south are
reached. Popular French prejudice credits
southerners with knowing how to enjoy
life in a hot, sunny land, but also accuses
them of idleness and dishonesty.
a change of perspective
Cross into northern Spain, and the clichés
reverse. The north is cold and severe. Gali
cians are melancholic and Catalans proud
and a bit miserly. The great bourgeois cities
of the north, like Barcelona, look down on
a backwardsouth deemed too fond of fairs
and fiestas to get anything done. To many
Spaniards, these stereotypes are common
sense: a reflection of realworld physical
differences. But there is a hitch. Look at a
map, and it becomes clear that one per
son’s north is another’s south. Take sup
posedly cold, northerly Barcelona. It lies
some way south of the sunbaked, south
ern French city of Marseille, and enjoys al
most the same climate.
A similar reset may be experienced in
Italy. By common consent, northern Italy
is businessminded and a bit unfriendly;
the south is Mafiainfested, inefficient and
poor. Within Italy, regional stereotypes are
matched by realworld differences: much
about life is harsher in the south, from the
climate to crime. Yet on a map of Europe,
distinctively northern Italy is not in the
north. Indeed haughty, handsome Flor
ence lies on a lower latitude than Avignon,
in the southern French region of Provence.
Some nasty prejudices lurk. The idea
that warm places are lazy is impossible to
separate from longdebunked theories of
racial superiority, seeking to explain why
white Europeans conquered African,
American and Asian colonies with such
brutal ease. Over the years, northwestern
Europeans came up with selfserving theo
ries to explain why Providence had or
dained that they should run the world.
They boasted that their climate was just
bracing enough to inspire men to industry,
whether that meant weaving fine clothes
or building cities of brick and stone, with
out being so cold as to make agriculture
impossible. They scorned hot places where
fewer clothes are necessary, and food sup
posedly falls from trees. In fact, the link be
tween temperate weather and invention is
distinctly weak. Until well into the Middle
Ages, northern and western Europe were
backwaters. Whether studying the history
of mathematics, medicine or literature,
civilisation flowed from east to west, car
ried from the Mediterranean basin, the Is
lamic world and China to damp, chilly
places like Germany or the British isles.
In the 20th century, the long shadow of
Max Weber and his claims to identify a dis
tinctly Protestant work ethic loom over any
discussion of productivity. I admit to scep
ticism, born of many years working in
America, whose diversity mocks any at
tempt to claim economic dynamism and
innovation for Protestantism, or any other
creed. Nor, for that matter, does modern
America lend itself to simple northsouth
generalisations, for all the clichés about
taciturn, diligent New Englanders and
drawling, bourbonsipping southerners.
For when the “South” is used to stand for
racial inequality, rural poverty and preju
dice, that means the old Confederacy. True,
the legacies of the slave era are shockingly
longlasting. During the covid19 pandem
ic, a comparison of states with high and
low vaccination rates resembles a Civil War
map. To this day, voting patterns in the ru
ral Midwest correlate with areas settled
from the north by demobilised Union sol
diers, and from the south by defeated Con
federate veterans.
Elsewhere, however, wave after wave of
internal migration and immigration have
redrawn American maps, many times over.
The far rural north of Florida votes like Ala
bama and Louisiana. But the rest of the
state is a melting pot in miniature, from
snowhaired Jewish New Yorkers in Palm
Beach to Cubans and Venezuelans in Mi
ami, or Puerto Ricans in Orlando. Report
ing from the southwestern Sunbelt, I met
conservative whites who had just migrated
to Arizona and Hispanic farmers whose
roots in New Mexico predate the founding
of the United States. In a restless, conti
nentsized country, any debate about re
gional clichés must first answer: which
north and which south?
Yet northsouth stereotypes are more
than a European quirk. Vietnam boasts
both genuine northsouth differences, and
stereotypes that draw on hardertocredit
notions about climate and topography.
Vietnam’s division from 1955 to 1975 into
two warring halves, a communist north
and an Americanbacked south, caused
cleavages that were still visible in the
mid1990s. Northern Hanoiwas in 1995 an
austere place, filled with political slogans
and war memorials. The old southern cap
ital of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, was
already a capitalist boomtown.
History explains much of that gap, says
Le Hong Hiep, a Vietnam scholar at the In
stitute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singa
pore. Southern Vietnam, historically a
great trading hub, knew only a few years of
communist central planning between the
American retreat in 1975 and the start of
market reforms in the 1980s. Later, return