The Economist Magazine Cover For 11/26/2022

 

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NOVEMBER 26TH 2022

SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image

Brexit has made life more complicated for farmers and small businesses by multiplying paperwork and spooling out red tape. It has also made life more complicated for our cover designers.    We used to depict Europe using the handy iconography of the European Union—euro coins, the EU’s yellow-starred flag, or the Berlaymont, a monstrous office building in the middle of Brussels. Since Brexit, all those are off the table, because the EU is missing Britain—just as it always missed Norway, Switzerland and a host of other places. This adds to a longstanding difficulty with European covers, which is that some of our Asian and American readers need a helping hand to see why the affairs of the old world should matter to them.   This week, with a worldwide cover on Europe, we faced both of these problems.

Ukraine is having a profound effect on Europe’s fortunes. A brutal economic squeeze will pose a test of Europe’s resilience in 2023 and beyond. There is a growing fear that the recasting of the global energy system, American economic populism and geopolitical rifts threaten the long-run competitiveness of the EU and non-members, including Britain. It is not just the continent’s prosperity that is at risk, the health of the transatlantic alliance is, too.   These images give you a sense of what our designers were up against. In one of them the euro-filled snowglobe has sprung a leak and in the other the EU’s flag is drooping as forlornly as the figure walking away from it. Unfortunately, both were out from the start, because they do not include all the countries we’re talking about.

We might have been able to tweak these designs. The windblown tree might have borne something other than yellow stars. The shrinking coins could have included the odd pound—which, after all, went through a dramatic period of shrinkage while Liz Truss was prime minister.

This is, admittedly, a star. However, at this point, we were thinking of a title “Europe: the sick man of the world”—a contrast to the more familiar “sick man of Europe” that, over the decades, has variously served as an epithet for Turkey, Italy, Germany and Britain. Next to it is a path leading down into the depths, a measure of the decline that lies ahead.

This looks good, but in colour it obviously refers to the EU alone. And it has a second fatal problem. If you ask around the globe what people think of Europe, some respond first with an expression of admiration. In the struggle to help Ukraine and resist Russian aggression, Europe has displayed unity, grit and a principled willingness to bear enormous costs. Only then do they follow with alarm at Europe’s gloomy prospects. The star is wrong because Europe is suffering not from its own frailties so much as from standing by Ukraine.

We could have fallen back on typography. Here we have EU colours, but we could easily have chosen black on red or some other combination. It looks good, but we thought an image would be more striking.

Here is where we came down. We have used a map to show that we are talking about the European continent, rather than the European Union. The icicles point to a large part of the problem, which is Russia’s weaponisation of energy supplies. And, paradoxically, the title—“Frozen out”—hints that the problem goes beyond the cold weather.    Energy inflation is spilling over into the rest of Europe’s economy. The war has exposed a vulnerability in Europe’s business model. Too many of Europe’s industrial firms, especially German ones, have relied on abundant energy inputs from Russia. Plenty of companies have also become more dependent on another autocracy, China, as an end market.    In Europe this winter promises to be long and hard. Alas, so does the next.

Cover image • View large image (“Frozen out”)

Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief