Europe's Mexico

We are in Casablanca this week – the commercial center of Morocco. A couple of days into a series of lectures on the Moroccan economy, one fascinating idea is emerging: Morocco is the Mexico of Europe. In addition to providing the underpinning of Latin America’s art, music, language and general culture, Morocco also shares with the largest nation of Latin America a series of challenges and, it seems, perspectives on the global economy.

Being an American, I hear the lectures from my own place, and cannot help but get excited about the possibilities. Morocco is geographically situated as an axis in the middle of the Arab world (to the west), West Africa (to the south) and Europe (to the north). It is a multilingual nation. It is a nation whose history screams tolerance (and even better, I would argue, Engagement). It is a nation pushing to create an educated population. All the ingredients are there in Morocco’s soup – any minute lightning will strike and a powerful new economy will emerge.

Or not?

What stops this thing? The simple answer is, ‘the entrepreneurial spirit,’ or, better, the absence of it. Moroccans, we are being told, do not feel intuitively what Americans seemingly have written into our DNA. As a culture (but remember, we have plenty of exceptions), we look at a situation and try to figure out how to convert it into a new business venture. It is very hard for us to imagine that this willingness to take a risk is not a universal human trait.

So how did WE get it and not them? Is it a product of our history, when we became what we are by exploring just over the frontier lines? Is it the myth of ‘up from our bootstraps’ told in all those rags-to-riches stories? Is it the model that our presidents have established, with Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton all coming from social nowhere to lead the most powerful nation on earth?

And can it be learned?