Gallivanting EU politicians reveal where power really lies Inside the Grand Tour of 27 European capitals Aug 27th 2026 The proper way to complete a young British gentleman’s education, in centuries gone by, was to send him on a Grand Tour of the continent. A traipse through Europe taking in Parisian salons, Milanese opera houses and Roman ruins was just the thing to turn an unkempt youth into a cultivated courtier. Over the months en route, he would pick up rudiments of the continent’s languages alongside a few paintings, gambling debts and the odd bout of gonorrhea. The Grand Tour was expensive and time-consuming, which was rather the point: what mattered was not so much seeing Europe as being seen to have seen it. For the family that had everything, a youngster’s gap year on the continent broadened the mind even as it narrowed the inheritance.
The democratisation of travel and the French habit of chopping off aristocratic heads put paid to the custom. But the Grand Tour has had a revival of sorts, not among the idle rich but among the continent’s political class. For the modern grandee serving the European Union, to be seen as out on the road is de rigueur. Nothing demonstrates commitment to ever-closer union so well as a circuit on the Grand Tour 2.0: a zip through the EU’s 27 national capitals, from mighty Berlin and Paris to humble Valletta and Luxembourg. Much like the jaunts of yore, such traipsing is expensive, time- consuming and undertaken largely for symbolic value. Then as now, the intent is less to learn anything than to prove one has made the effort. Been there, done that. The latest politico to try his hand at frequent-flyer diplomacy is António Costa, who as president of the European Council chairs confabs of EU leaders. For the second year running the former Portuguese prime minister will schlep to chancelleries across the bloc on a tour des capitales. In 2025 it took three weeks for Mr Costa to accumulate grip-and-grins from 23 EU members. This time 26 stops are planned (Sweden, in the midst of elections, will have to wait). For a man whose job is to herd two dozen leaders towards agreement, rushing through two or three capitals a day has a certain logic. But a slew of lesser EU-wallahs have done their own travel box-ticking, in a revival of the Grand Tour genre. At least four European commissioners have visited all 27 countries since taking office in December 2024, with a handful of others aiming to notch up the remaining capitals soon. National politicians too are occasionally tempted by the challenge: Emmanuel Macron undertook a Grand Tour in his first five years as French president. Completing the EU-capitals set has become the Eurocratic equivalent of filling a Panini sticker album. Brussels-based types may think of the habit as an earnest effort by the vast EU apparatus to solicit the views of the provincial Everymen for whom they are devising policies. That is doubtful. Unlike the junior aristos on the OG Grand Tour, today’s visiting Euro- dignitaries encounter few ordinary citizens (and probably contract less gonorrhea). Beyond the odd farmer dragooned into a photo-op or students forced to endure pontificating speeches, it is mainly national-level politicians who get to meet roaming EU bigshots. The exercise may be billed as a listening tour, but it is one in which the listeners studiously avoid the electorate.
What is the point of all this, beyond accumulating air-miles? After all, most polities designate a capital city where folk from the provinces congregate to meet and get stuff done. The EU has a serviceable one, Brussels, where its main institutions are based. Ministers serving national governments from Poland to Portugal shuffle in and out every week (except in most of August; this is Europe, after all). A permanent cadre of senior national diplomats plugged into their respective governments spend their time in a more or less continuous co-ordination meeting. Yet despite these institutionalised communication channels, the Euro-pilgrimage continues. There is something wonderfully European about an official travelling to Ljubljana to have a conversation that could easily have happened a week later in Brussels. Grand Tours were once a common feature of the EU. National leaders used to take six-month turns chairing meetings of their fellow prime ministers, and would knock on each chancellery’s door in the run-up to their first summit in charge. Such a jaunt could be done and dusted in a couple of days when the union was first formed in the 1950s, taking in just six countries. But the practice fell into abeyance. From 2009 a new permanent presidency (currently held by Mr Costa) stopped the practice of rotating ones at leader level, and so the impetus to travel. The bloc’s expansion by the 2000s to 28 members (for a while) turned visiting every national capital into an endurance test too trying for most. The recent resurgence of the Grand Tour reveals something about how Europe is run. In most governments, politicians from the provinces travel to the capital to lobby. In Europe it is the other way round. Policymaking is at times centralised at EU level—but power stems from national capitals. Eurosceptics may yammer about an out-of-control cadre of Brussels officials running amok, but the opposite is closer to the truth. National governments decide what they want to see happen, and get the machinery in Brussels to do their bidding. Eurocrats who travel outwards are, if not bending, at least flexing the knee to Europe’s true sovereigns. To the EU project’s purists, who would like more decisions made in Brussels, its officials’ wanderlust is a depressing reminder of how little power they wield. Perhaps the practice will fall into abeyance again. Enlargement of the EU is on the agenda; on August 29th Icelanders will vote on whether to apply for membership. Several Balkan countries are applying,
as is Ukraine. A trip to 27 capitals is already exhausting. A detour to Reykjavík, Kyiv or Sarajevo may prove a bridge too far. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/08/27/gallivanting-eu-politicians-reveal- where-power-really-lies
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British politicians want a manufacturing jobs boom It’s a poor way to achieve economic growth Aug 27th 2026 Andy Burnham’s pronouncement in July at a train factory in Derby sounded like good common sense: “AI might be able to write an essay, draft a contract or make a slide deck,” the prime minister said. “But it can’t make a train.” Yet it hides dodgy assumptions. The first is that AI, paired with robotics, may well make trains one day. And Britain is not very good at making them now. The Derby factory is a case in point: its flagship £1bn ($1.4bn) order for trains to serve England’s South West was a study in incompetence, running over four years late. The plant limps on only because the state insists on building in Britain.
For industrial nostalgists like Mr Burnham, the decline of British manufacturing has been hard to watch (see chart 1). In 2025 manufacturing made up only 8% of the economy’s output, down from 17% in 1990. This is the lowest share in the G7 group of large rich countries (Germany’s is 18%). Whereas manufacturing employed 25% of the British workforce in 1979, it now employs only 7%. The job losses were painful—the work was skilled and well-paid in areas with few other opportunities. “The Full Monty”, a 1997 film in which former steelworkers in Sheffield turn to stripping in order to make money, captures the anguish well. Politicians from across the spectrum want to wind back the clock. Nigel Farage, the populist-right leader of Reform UK, has called for Britain to “produce all the stuff we need” domestically. He is particularly exercised by steel, an industry that is as totemic as it is unprofitable. Mr Burnham has called for Britain’s “reindustrialisation”. Some optimistically read this as a desire to strengthen all Britain’s exporting sectors, services included. Yet his wider rhetoric, whether about trains or the need to safeguard “sovereign manufacturing”, suggests a man mostly focused on machines. Hard-hatted enthusiasts like Mr Burnham think that a manufacturing renaissance will not just power national growth, but create jobs in left-
behind areas and strengthen national security. As a strategy, this is likely to misfire on all counts. Take growth. It is very difficult to change a country’s comparative advantages. The Resolution Foundation, a think-tank, has calculated that seven of the ten products Britain specialised in most in 1989 were still among its top ten in 2019. Like it or not, Britain’s strengths lie in its knowledge-based services. Arty advertisers, pedantic lawyers and boisterous bankers keep the economy afloat. Whereas British goods exports have grown by only 24% in real terms since 2000, its services exports have grown by 181% (see chart 2). Services now comprise 60% of all exports, up from about a quarter in the 1980s. A visitor from Mars would be perplexed that British politicians lament this transition. Countries that specialise in services are, on average, richer than manufacturing-heavy ones and better placed to profit as global trade tilts further toward services. AI, despite its disruption, promises productivity gains for nimble service-based economies. Germany, meanwhile, shows the perils of clinging to an industrial past: Chinese competition and Europe’s high energy prices have left the continent’s manufacturing superpower with the weakest growth in the G7 since 2020. As Sophie Hale of the Resolution