On hotels and being a "hotel citizen."

The industrial hotel has been an economic triumph. But over the years its uniformity has made it an emotional failure.
-- The Economist ("A short history of hotels: Be my guest")

Substitute the word "beer" for "hotel," any grasp my life the past quarter-century.

During which I've done my fair share of traveling, and to me, the entirety of hotels (or hostels, or Airbnb) comes down to an affordable place to sleep.

Consequently, I've tended to worry less about ambiance; when traveling in civilized places possessing public transport (read: Europe), location means less, too. You can always get there from somewhere.

Obviously, there is more to it.

The “Romance” of Travel, by André Naffis-Sahely (The Paris Review)

Joseph Roth’s hotel years.

“I am a hotel citizen,” Joseph Roth declared in one of the newspaper dispatches anthologized in The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars, “a hotel patriot.” It’s easy to see why: Red Joseph was nothing if not a cosmopolitan humanist, and the hotel was his natural habitat. “The guests come from all over the world,” he explains:

Continents and seas, islands, peninsulas and ships, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists are all represented in this hotel. The cashier adds, subtracts, counts and cheats in many languages, and changes every currency. Freed from the constriction of patriotism, from the blinkers of national feeling, slightly on holiday from the rigidity of love of land, people seem to come together here and at least appear to be what they should always be: children of the world.

The European Union, the Habsburg Monarchy and my nightstand.

"Downton Abbey's" okay, but quite unexpectedly in 2012, the history and legacy of the Habsburg dynasty again became a theme with me, reflected by three novels forming the core of my reading since the middle of June:

Robert Musil, “The Man Without Qualities”
Joseph Roth, "The Radetzky March"
Gregor Von Rezzori, "An Ermine on Czernopol"

Musil was a lengthy commitment, and Roth a far easier read, though no less compelling. The latter novel is ongoing, but may prove to be the most interesting of  them all.

I covered some of this in an earlier post: European Journal. Well, sort of. In the following essay, Cooper picks up where the late Otto left off.

The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy, by Robert Cooper (Eurozine)

The Habsburg Monarchy lasted five centuries. It was both solid and flexible; it aroused genuine affection among its citizens. But it vanished in a puff of smoke. Should we expect the European Union, shallow in history and unloved by those it serves, to do better?

To be fair, it was more than a puff of smoke. The bullets from Gavrilo Princip's revolver killed the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia. What killed the Habsburg Monarchy was the four years of pounding by artillery that followed. This brought death and ruin to the old Europe; in Russia it brought revolution and tyranny, and in Germany regime change accompanied by failed revolution, then inflation and depression, and finally world war and genocide.

What arose from the ashes? The answer is: the European Union and NATO. It is the EU and its resemblance to the Habsburg Monarchy that is the subject of this essay, but something needs first to be said about NATO which was and is its indispensable partner.