From Valsaín to European Imperium

On the Equilibrium between Living Traditions, Prosperity, and Power

When planning a trip to Spain to speak at a conference addressing “a new world of threats”, I decided to spend the preceding weekend hiking around Madrid. My longest hike would be to the hamlet of Valsaín in the Province of Segovia.

I booked a room at what I believe was the only guesthouse in the hamlet. A few days later, the guesthouse informed me that the Valsaín Festivities would be taking place during my stay. This meant that parking nearby would not be possible, and a band would play close to the guesthouse at night, implying plenty of noise (there was!). The managers apologised for any inconvenience this might cause and thanked me for my understanding, adding that the festivities were “an important part of the local identity”.

I replied that I would not need parking, as I would be hiking, and that I would be glad to observe the festivities. At the back of my mind, I was also intrigued by the polite assertiveness of the message, its non-negotiable boundaries expressed with courtesy.

After a 20+ km hike on a path shared with cars, fellow senderistas, and the occasional bull (in which case I slightly adjusted my route), I arrived in Valsaín.

On the way to Valsaín

I found a small community full of self-respect and pride. Despite its small size – Valsaín has about 180 residents of all ages – the hamlet appears to have sustained a self-sufficient economy for centuries. Locals manage the Valsaín Valley, one of Spain’s best-conserved pine forests, balancing timber production, conservation, grazing, and recreation. One poem described Valsaín as “a land where no one is a stranger, a land of logging, a Castilian land, stone buildings, oak trees, pine trees, and waterfalls”.

Naturally, as a hamlet, Valsaín depends on nearby towns for shopping, schooling, and policing. Yet the self-reliance of its economy – the fact that its main industry does not depend on external support – grants the community a considerable degree of cultural independence and helps preserve Valsaín’s traditional identity.

This is rare. In many places across Spain, authentic local cultures were first eroded by modernisation, which accelerated after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. They were later smoothed down by the standardising and regulatory practices of European integration. And, more recently, the growing reliance on tourism has turned the identities of many Spanish towns into commodified versions of local life – entertaining for foreigners, yet disheartening for natives not involved in the hospitality industry.

A song by one of my favourite Spanish bands, “Pablo und Destruktion”, laments precisely these developments (English translation below):

En el puerto de Gijón todo ha cambiado mucho

Solo importa el dinero, ¿dónde quedó el orgullo?

Era lo que querían, malditos europeos

Volvernos puritanos, blandos, gordos y muermos.

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Everything has changed so much in the port of Gijón

All that matters is money, where has pride gone?

It was what they wanted, those bloody Europeans

To turn us into puritans, soft, fat and dead.

The song romanticises the rough authenticity of Gijón in the 1950s-1980s, when the city’s identity was bound up with its port and working-class life. It insists that the true culture of Gijón was found in lives that were dangerous and poor, yet filled with humour, solidarity, and pride.

This poetic glorification of the port neighbourhoods – the world of sailors, prostitutes, petty criminals, and outcasts – inevitably omits the social costs of poverty, addiction, violence, and marginality. And, in defence of malditos europeos, one can note that Spain’s integration into the European Economic Community was welcomed by many working families in Gijón, who were willing to trade gritty authenticity for better jobs, higher living standards, infrastructure upgrades, and, yes, the gentrification and cultural losses that followed.

Not all modernisation is bad, and not all cultural authenticity is worth preserving, especially when maintained artificially. The great Pedro Almodóvar would, today, likely be remembered only as a cult figure of Madrid’s subculture of punk, drag, and drugs had his films not evolved into more polished and internationally acclaimed works – a transformation that mirrored Madrid’s own cultural passage in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the point here is that once you make the sustainability of your everyday life economically dependent on external sources, your society will inevitably lose, to a greater or lesser degree, many of the cultural textures that once defined it.

European integration is a smaller compromise in this regard. Look at Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, San Sebastián... There, economies rely heavily on international tourism, and, as a result, local cultures have increasingly been transformed into tourist attractions with only superficial ties to their origins. Authentic heritage has been dramatically commercialised, reducing once-living traditions to consumable spectacles. Rituals and customs that once carried deep collective meaning are now re-packaged as performances for outsiders...

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As I was leaving Valsaín for Segovia, from which I would take a train to Madrid, I passed by a handmade sign “Independencia Valsaín” attached to a wooden pole.

The sign had appeared during the Valsaín festivities, and apparently echoed carnivalesque practices of forming temporary egalitarian communal spaces during festivals with their playful rejections of established hierarchies, mock enthronements of ordinary people, and burlesque proclamations of imaginary kingdoms.

But all carnivalesque suspensions of social and political order eventually give way to its restoration. Once the festivities of “independent Valsaín” are over, the hamlet returns to being a tierra castellana, firmly identifying with and deeply rooted in the territory long seen as the cultural heart of Spain.

And here lies the wisdom of the people of Valsaín: they know that economic sustainability gives them the means to preserve and celebrate their living traditions without commodifying them to entertain foreigners, yet it is the security provided by the Spanish state that allows this sustainability to endure.

Spain’s security for Valsaín ranges from law enforcement and fire protection – services for which the hamlet has no local station – to the roads that link it to nearby towns, the energy that powers daily life, the social guarantees that sustain its people, and the wider legal frameworks upheld by the authority of the state.

Yet it would be a mistake to regard the persistence of authentic local identities as the ultimate purpose of a functioning economy and state-backed security. Rather, the three together – living identities, economic vitality, and state-backed security – form a tripartite equilibrium. Communities such as Valsaín, where traditions, shared practices, and collective memory strengthen cohesion and belonging, are sources of trust and solidarity. These help sustain the resilience of their economic life, and as they flow from one community to another, trust and solidarity become part of the wider fabric of cooperation that supports Spain’s stability and security.

Neither in Spain nor elsewhere in Europe, this equilibrium is perfect, but it offers a vision of resilience. By holding the three elements together, it suggests how national communities can remain authentic and sustainable in a changing world.

Yet the idea of equilibrium also reminds us that disturbing even one of its elements unsettles the whole. Internal threats – the erosion of authentic identities, demographic decline, elite corruption, or the slow decay of institutions – tend to unfold gradually, leaving time for repair. Nations, guided by an instinct for self-preservation, usually find ways to restore balance as these pressures mount. External threats, by contrast, arrive with a swiftness and scale that local mechanisms often cannot contain, overwhelming the system before it can gather itself to respond.

Combinations of external and internal threats – when domestic weaknesses leave nations exposed to dangers from outside – are often the most vicious. Yet the most insidious are those born of existential dependence on external sources of life and stability.

These do not feel like an attack, they creep in quietly, often disguised as convenience, prosperity, or modernisation. They may remain dormant for dozens of years. By the time the risks are clear, the structures of reliance may be too deep to undo quickly. External source may be even disrupted or weaponised, and then the effects are immediate and devastating, and far harder to resist than a slow-burning internal problem.

Overtourism does not only commodify traditions and erode the cultural textures of local communities, it also breeds dependency on forces beyond their control. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this fragility: revenues disappeared overnight, jobs and people were lost, and the strains of environmental damage and rising costs no longer seemed justified. Communities that had reshaped themselves around the tourist economy were left with frustration and a sense of betrayal, their sacrifices unrewarded. Wars, economic crises, and climate change can just as abruptly disrupt international tourism, exposing the vulnerability of communities that depend too heavily on it.

An Absinthe bar in Prague turned into one of the many faceless mini-markets that have flooded the Czech capital, now overcrowded with international tourists

From another angle, malign global actors such as Russia or China have also weaponised dependencies on tourism, using travel bans, suspended flights, and cancelled package tours – as in Russia’s measures against Turkey and Georgia – to exert political pressure. At the same time, some European states may hesitate to impose particular sanctions on Russia or China for wars or human rights abuses because of their reliance on Russian and Chinese tourists, effectively sidelining the suffering of victims of these authoritarian regimes.

Cheap Russian oil and gas supplies created energy dependencies in a number of European states, convincing Moscow that Europe would be unable to respond swiftly and decisively to its war against Ukraine, while at the same time bankrolling that very war – with dramatic consequences for Europe’s own security.

And can you truly complain about foreigners “invading” European streets, if at the same time you are content for national industries, pension funds, healthcare, and agriculture to rest on their labour? And can you complain, either, when universities depend on overseas students whose fees keep their doors open to local students, and on international researchers and funding that sustain the national academia’s place in global science?

After the Second World War, neither Western nor Eastern Europe fully controlled its own security environment, as the standoff between the US and the USSR overshadowed local choices. In Eastern Europe, Soviet domination was imposed through military occupation and political repression. Western Europe, by contrast, haunted by the memory of German aggression and fearful of Soviet expansion, chose to place its security in American hands voluntarily. In the 2000s, a united Europe has continued to accept existential dependence on external sources of security.

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While culturally and economically sustainable, the hamlet Valsaín is dependent on the Spanish state for its security. But in today’s globalised world characterised by global threats, Spain itself – like all European states – relies on a larger entity for its security, in a way that echoes the relationship between Valsaín and Spain. That entity is NATO, but its ultimate strength lies outside Europe, resting on the political will, resources, and solidarity of Washington. And the gradual US withdrawal from Europe today is leaving the continent in its most perilous position in decades.

Europe today stands at a crossroads: either it summons its inner economic, political, and intellectual strength to secure its future, or it fragments, with parts of the continent surrendering elements of their sovereignty to external powers.

For the regions of the European continent, a united Europe offers the most fitting geopolitical expression of equilibrium between identity, economy, and security. Anything less than Europe leaves them too small to guarantee their own security, while anything larger threatens to blur the colours and textures of the cultures that give the continent its depth.

The existing project of a united Europe, the EU, cannot guarantee the continent’s security in a world of global challenges and threats. Its machinery can and should serve to sharpen Europe’s global economic competitiveness, but it is fundamentally dysfunctional as the foundation of a European geopolitical order.

The EU’s political layer belongs to the era in which it was created, to the age of telegraphs, telephones, and radio. It must give way to a union forged around defence and the collective strength of its nations. This new union must be the equivalent of high-speed Internet and real-time connectivity, a framework built for speed, resilience, and power, able to withstand the storms of today and tomorrow.

Otherwise, Europe’s fate will lie between marginality, ruins, and a lifeless museum. Without strategic autonomy, and with economic sovereignty surrendered to foreign autocracies, some European cultures will vanish forever, while others – whose architecture is celebrated on postcards and tourist brochures – may be preserved by new masters as a façade, yet behind it there will be no living identities, no living rituals, no life itself...

As I left Valsaín, I also left behind the silent ruins of its once-magnificent royal palace. Consumed by fire in 1682, it was never rebuilt. Not for lack of worth, but because Spain of that time was weighed down by internal instability, weakened central authority, and external pressures that drained its treasury. Abandoned by circumstance and neglect, the ruins of the Palace of Valsaín stand today as an omen for Europe, a reminder of how splendour can fade when the structures that sustain it collapse.