I VIVIDLY REMEMBER MY FIRST VISIT TO LATVIA, NOT LONG AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was surprised to notice that the sun was shining when I stepped out of Riga Airport, and my surprise took me by surprise. I was also surprised to notice that there were unmistakable daisies growing in the decidedly green grass in front of the emphatically modern terminal building and was equally surprised to see an unquestionably young couple definitely kissing on a bench in the unambiguously warm sunshine.

All this surprise was thanks to a steady diet of anti-Soviet propaganda which had shaped my unquestioned belief since the 1970s that behind the iron curtain nobody ever falls in love (except, fatally, with spies), it’s always cold and rainy, and everything’s in black and white. Yet here instead were Nordic-looking forests of birch and pine, lonely rocky beaches overlooking the sparkling sea, cozy wooden houses. Most of Latvia didn’t look in the least like the ghastly, radioactive, postindustrial wasteland I had been carefully conditioned to expect: a set of images which had been sitting in my unconscious mind for decades like a sleeper cell in a Cold War thriller, subtly influencing my thoughts and feelings about this part of the world throughout my life, waiting until this day to be triggered.

On returning to Latvia barely a decade later, this time at the invitation of the Latvian government, almost nothing remained to recall my dystopian mental image of the place, apart from the peeling Soviet-era apartment blocks that still disfigure the outskirts of so many towns and cities in Eastern Europe. Here instead were people happily shouting into mobile phones, shiny Japanese cars and noisy dirty trucks, and glass buildings and shops and trashy advertisements promoting discounts on laundry detergent. This time, I hadn’t left the European Union to get here, and it showed.

In my first conversation with the Latvian cabinet when we met in the historic, beautiful, and startlingly pink Birini Castle, the question of the legitimacy of the project was immediately raised: Aigars Kalvītis, the prime minister, felt strongly that a government’s attempts to improve the image of a country should be fully communicated, understood, and endorsed by the general population.

I agreed with him. This is a topic about which many citizens have understandably strong feelings. The identity of one’s country is in some respects an extension of one’s own identity, and a country’s good name is the property of its population, not the property of the government. This isn’t playing around with money; this is playing around with culture and identity, and those are serious matters.

As I traveled around the country speaking to the usual broad mix of local and national government officials, city mayors, business leaders, celebrities, students and academics, trade unionists, manual and knowledge workers, foreign investors and diplomats, I found little enthusiasm for the idea of a higher international profile for Latvia, no matter what the social or economic benefits might prove to be, no matter what methods were used to achieve it. In fact, the majority of people I spoke to outside of Riga, the capital, seemed distinctly unhappy about the whole topic. The prospect of participating more actively and prominently in the community of nations had little appeal. It was as if, after centuries of malign foreign rule, Latvia was finally alone, finally sovereign; and it seemed that many Latvians would now prefer to rest for a while in the margins of globalization.

I couldn’t blame them. The way many Latvians described their experience of living under Soviet rule brought back an image from my own childhood: being persecuted by the school bully as he sat with his fat behind on my head, feeling utterly paralyzed with pain and terror, focusing with rigid intensity on a tiny blade of grass just millimeters from my nose, willing myself to believe that I was tiny enough to crawl under it and never be found by anyone ever again.

It occurred to me that the country’s huge cultural production (in Latvia, there are allegedly more folksongs than Latvians) might be the consequence of a similar feeling: a vast outpouring of national longing and distress, written on air and committed only to memory so that nobody else could ever know it, understand it, or steal it away.

Under oppressive regimes, the longing for the simple blessings of nature, for the peace and freedom to enjoy one’s homeland, becomes profoundly ingrained in the national psyche, and Latvians simply hadn’t had much time to enjoy this condition after centuries of yearning for it. Perhaps they weren’t quite ready to share their land with strangers again.

This desire to be respected, understood, and left alone is not unique to Latvia—I have encountered similar ambiguities in other smaller, less industrialized countries in the early stages of integration into the “community of nations”—Bhutan, Slovenia, and the Faroe Islands are three other examples which spring to mind.

Yet at the same time, Latvia faced big developmental challenges which would be hard to overcome unless it could expand its trade and tourism; and that, in turn, would be doubly difficult for a country with such poor international standing. The great democracies of old Europe had been building their reputation for centuries, while Latvia and its Baltic neighbors—as far as the West was concerned—simply didn’t exist until a few years ago.

Having said this, becoming a member of the European Union gave Latvia a good deal of latitude in this respect. Part of the appeal of the EU is that it provides a “safe space” for less prominent, less well regarded countries to quietly prosper. The robust collective identity of Europe protects their fragile identity, and the burden of competing in a brutally globalized world is shared with more powerful fellow member states.

So, after several months of further investigation, research, and debate, the strategy I developed for Latvia, to everybody’s surprise including my own, was based on the principle that attempting to raise Latvia’s international standing was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Raising the standing of Riga, on the other hand, seemed like an excellent idea. Cities, on the whole, are easier to establish in the public consciousness than countries, partly because they tend to be smaller and simpler than countries, making it more realistic to teach the world about them, and partly because they are also separated in the public mind from much of the political, social, and historical baggage which can make countries more complex and less appealing. Cities are easier to promote as destinations, as they match the business and leisure travel patterns of modern consumers better than countries do. City governments, too, are often more entrepreneurial and faster moving than national administrations.

And nobody I spoke to in Riga minded the idea of their city shining bright once again in the constellation of Nordic capitals, up there alongside Oslo, Tallinn, Stockholm, Helsinki, Vilnius, and Copenhagen—indeed, it was what they desired. In my final report to the Latvian cabinet, I included a heartfelt recommendation that the best remedy for Latvia’s weak reputation was simply for Riga to market itself vigorously as a tourist and business destination, as an investment magnet, as a vibrant and dignified international city of business and culture.

The Faroe Islands are the very quintessence of a marginal place: it’s a very small, very remote, very sparsely populated country, and an awful lot of people have never heard of it. Flying there can be a disagreeable experience too, but I’ll tell you about that later.

It’s also absolutely lovely, and tremendously important to its own population and to the handful of others who know and love it, but I can never help but wonder how realistic it is for such places to desire a global profile.

The Nation Brands Index suggests that most people around the world only ever think about three countries: their own (not a lot, unless it’s particularly contested); the United States or some other major power with the potential to exert real influence over their life; and a third country which has some personal relevance to them or their close family.

So the question which I always feel I must ask the governments of small countries who tell me they want their country to become globally recognized is, “So which country are you intending to take out? The United States? Other people’s own homeland? Or a third one that’s particularly special and relevant to them and their close family?”

To be fair, the reason for the Faroese government wanting my advice was partly defensive; they weren’t intent on hammering the United States in a global popularity contest. Rather, they were worried about the impact on their image of the grind, the traditional Faroese slaughter of pilot whales. Global public opinion today is firmly against whaling in all its forms, and it isn’t interested in nuances or exceptions or complex debates about which whales are endangered, or about balancing a traditional way of life against the lives of wild animals.

Yes, the grind is primitive and horrible to see if you haven’t grown up with it (compared with, for example, the hidden and hygienic dispatch of the thousands of hens or dozens of cattle needed to produce the same weight of chicken or beef), and entirely unnecessary in today’s world. Yes, it’s an ancient tradition, but stoning adulterers to death is also an ancient tradition, and some traditions are best left in the past where they belong. On the other hand, pilot whales are not a threatened species, the numbers killed are insignificant and entirely sustainable, the meat is all shared and eaten without waste, and trained humane killing is now mandatory.

And there you have it: a complex and highly divisive dichotomy, in which the balance of argument is actually quite hard to call and can be tipped only by the vigorous application of strong emotions, of which, of course, there are more than enough on both sides.

What many people in the Faroes (and Iceland, whose whaling activities were also generating a good deal of negative feeling) didn’t seem to appreciate fully is that international public opinion is basically a force of nature, like a hurricane or a volcano, and imagining that you can control it, argue with it, or even properly understand it, is a dangerous delusion.

So if your village is built on the slopes of a volcano, and lava starts to flow from the crater, what do you do? Some people, of course, will waste precious time complaining about how unfair it is, and how their village has been standing there for generations, and how they have a perfect right to remain where they are. And of course they are absolutely, 100 percent correct, just as surely as they are absolutely, 100 percent doomed.

Others will start moving their possessions somewhere a little safer. No prizes for guessing whether pride or common sense saves more lives.

The village on the slopes of a volcano isn’t a perfect metaphor for the Icelandic or Faroese whaling issue, because if one foolish family wants to stay in its house and defy the lava, then that’s their own business. But any Icelander or Faroese who wishes to defy public opinion and keep on whaling is putting everybody’s well-being, and the good name of the entire country, at risk.

It might be possible for Iceland or the Faroes to make a net reputational gain from this sorry situation, actually a better outcome than if it had never happened, if the country took a strong and public moral stand against the practice of whaling—despite the cultural and historical rootedness of the practice—and demanded that it stop precisely because it isn’t how a civilized people behaves in today’s world.

And I don’t think that gain in international approval would necessarily produce a domestic loss, either, because the final, sad irony is that the high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury, and titanium now present in whale meat have resulted in public health warnings against its consumption, so the practice will likely die out soon anyway. This toxicity is thanks to the pollution caused by the industrial processes that make modern consumer lifestyles possible for all of us, including and perhaps especially for the wealthy, educated Europeans and North Americans who tend to be the most active and vocal protesters against whaling.

The idea that a specific set of behaviors within one country produces a specific effect within another was never a solid argument, and now it has become sheer nonsense. We are all responsible, and we are all paying the consequences.

It’s so hard to describe the Faroes adequately. When I tell people about it, I constantly find myself reaching for language I wouldn’t previously have been seen dead with—stunning, awesome—yet here is one of the places for which these sorts of words were really intended. If you can imagine the Grand Canyon spray-painted green, inverted, and carefully set down in the magnificent gray waters of the North Atlantic, you’d have some sense of the place.

And on the close-cropped grassy slopes of some of the 779 islands, islets, and skerries that make up the Faroes are scattered ancient dark wooden houses, with living grass growing on their steeply pitched roofs, and sheep grazing on those roofs. (I was told by a taxi driver when I first arrived in the Faroes that the sheep have a pronounced limp caused by one pair of legs growing longer than the other, as a result of standing on the pitched roofs all day and lacking the intelligence to turn around from time to time. I’m ashamed to say that I believed him.)

The weather is quite something. The locals have a saying: “If you don’t like the weather, wait.” After a few visits I gave up bothering to feel nervous about heading for the airport under menacing black storm clouds, because as often as not, dense fog would come out of nowhere, and I’d get out of the taxi forty-five minutes later to the chirping of moorland birds in dazzling sunshine, and just when I’d cheered up and the plane was ready to board, a blizzard would blow in from the hills.

One reason I always felt particularly at home in the Faroes even though I dreaded getting there and going home was that, as I soon discovered, most of the population is terrified of flying. They start serving free alcohol five minutes after leaving Copenhagen, so that by the time the pilots are ready to start puzzling out how to set down a large and fast-moving airplane safely onto a small pointy steep slippery wet windy lump of gray rock in the middle of an immense gray ocean, everybody on the plane (everybody apart from the pilots, one hopes) is beyond caring.

Now everything depends on the direction of the wind: If it’s blowing from the west, you approach directly from the sea, and in fair weather the landing is merely gut-wrenching, and you can make a full recovery in a few days as long as you keep your fluids up. But if the wind is easterly, the approach is over the fjord, and the turbulence during final approach can be, how should I put this, unsettling. One of the cabin crew once told me that after a fjord approach on a windy day, you could probably detach all 116 passengers from their seats in a single block, all locked rigid and sitting bolt upright, teeth clenched, eyes staring glassily forward, and both hands gripping an imaginary armrest. She added drily that this would make disembarking a lot quicker as most of them are usually unable to stand.

On one occasion I was given the rare treat of being allowed to sit in the jump seat between the pilots on the way back to Copenhagen, and I had the most preternaturally smooth flight I have ever experienced in my life, before or since. It was a perfectly still, beautiful evening at every altitude we touched, the red sun gracefully sinking behind us toward a distant, lambent horizon as we wafted gently eastward. The plane didn’t so much as tremble or flutter from the moment it lifted off from Vágar to the moment it touched down in Kastrup. I could happily have stayed up there all night, listening to the calm, capable voices of air traffic control on the radio, the pretty rows of dials and screens twinkling in the twilight of the cockpit, and the great sleeping earth majestically turning below us toward the night. How earnestly I used to pray for a repeat of those conditions every time I made that flight! My prayers were never answered.

Something I often suggested to the governments I advised was to invite a “wild card” individual to join our conversations: somebody who wasn’t any kind of government official but who had some other useful or original perspective on the life of the nation, its place in the world, or the genius of its people. In Chile, we’d had a famous TV comedian whose insights into the way the people think was priceless. Comedians often have their finger on the pulse of the national psyche. In Austria, we had Cardinal Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna and head of the Catholic Church in Austria; in Iceland we had Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir, a kindergarten and elementary teacher who is also a pioneer in gender-aware primary education; and in the Faroes we had Teitur, the genius singer-songwriter who could at any point in his career have hit the big time but just seemed to prefer not to. I took one of his albums back to England, and my highly discerning teenage daughters would listen to nothing else for nearly a year. You can’t wear a hole in a CD, but they certainly tried.

One of my fondest memories of the Faroes is listening to Teitur singing like a scruffy, self-deprecating angel to an old broken guitar as we sailed in a fishing boat to another island where we ate huge delicious mussels on the beach, boiled in their own broth in an old tin bucket.

Luckily it was a short crossing and a calm day. As if being scared of flying isn’t humiliating enough, I also get seasick so easily I almost feel ill in the bathtub. I didn’t have to do much sailing in the Faroes, however, as there are no fewer than twenty-two undersea tunnels linking the major islands, some of them several kilometers long. The latest one, currently under construction, will be more than eleven kilometers long when completed and will have an undersea roundabout in the middle. These tunnels cost astonishing amounts of money and are not very heavily used (the entire Faroese population is barely 50,000 people). Faroese politicians have a habit of promising to build them in order to win elections and then, unlike politicians in many other parts of the world, feel obliged to keep their promises.

And speaking of food, the best lamb I’ve ever eaten in my life was on the Faroes, but I’m afraid you can’t have it without going there too: none is exported. I also ate, just to be polite but with serious misgivings, a puffin. This ridiculously cute bird, for all the world like a cartoon drawing of a technicolor flying penguin, is a great local delicacy, caught on the cliffs with a shrimping net on a long handle at enormous risk to the catcher (and even more to the puffin). I was convinced I’d wake up in the middle of the night felled by remorse because I’d eaten a toon, but I’m sorry to report that it was so absolutely delicious I slept like a baby.

Something that did keep me awake at night, however, was the sound of cheaply customized cars (by which I mean a hole punched in the muffler of a small Peugeot) racing along the single stretch of straight road in and out of Tórshavn, the capital. Unfortunately, young men tend to get quite bored living on small islands, and risking their necks by racing around in cars is one way they can assuage this boredom. As soon as they can, they tend to leave, usually to Denmark, and part of the reason why the Faroese government wanted my advice was that they were keen to find ways of encouraging the population to stay. Actually, in my view it’s a good thing if young people do go away, get educated, learn new skills, and earn some money—as long as some of them come back again. Encouraging them to return is the tricky part, but so deeply rooted is the sense of belonging in the Faroes, most of them do come home again, sooner or later.

As the question of preventing population loss was on the agenda, I asked the group I was working with to try a thought experiment. In 2008, the then-president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, had announced that as a result of rising sea levels his country would be underwater within a few decades, so his population was looking for somewhere new to live. Since the Faroe Islands suffered from a population drain and a persistent labor shortage, I asked the group to consider the modest proposal that the Faroese should invite all the Maldivians to move in with them.

Of course the easiest thing for everyone to do was to think of reasons why this couldn’t possibly work and shouldn’t even be contemplated. Yet, when encouraged to take the opposite position, it proved equally easy (and much more fun) to argue why the arrangement would work for both parties, quite aside from the ignoble motivation of becoming instantly world famous. The main occupation for both populations was sea fishing, so re-skilling wouldn’t be necessary. A Muslim participant observed that, in his opinion, the values and principles of Islam and the rather conservative Lutheran Protestantism of the Faroes weren’t a million miles apart. A fashion designer pointed out that the Maldivians would undoubtedly feel the cold at first, and this would provide a useful boost to the Faroese knitwear and outer garment industries. Finding reasons why was clearly more productive and enjoyable than finding reasons why not.

The group concluded that this was a marriage made in heaven, even if the politicians would never agree to it, but the exercise had a serious point. At first, it had sounded like a joke—and perhaps a joke in rather poor taste, given the very real plight of the Maldivians—but some analysis and some constructive debate soon separated out the useful components from the ludicrous, the feasible from the impossible, the creative from the boring. And the exercise diverted our discussion into productive and previously unimaginable directions, as well as endowing us all with a new feeling of creative energy, of endless possibilities. And having spent some time wondering what the Faroes could do about climate change, it proved impossible to leave out that topic in subsequent discussions.

In reality, jokes and serious creative ideas are part of the same continuum of intellectual activity: both are ideas which aim to produce an unusual effect, often by bringing together disparate ideas which are not commonly combined. The philosopher Henri Bergson referred to two types of humor—ha-ha! and aha!—and I’m sure he was drawing the same distinction.⁹ I have often found that a really good joke can be easily converted into a practical, original idea: it’s just a question of identifying the element of the joke that makes it absurd, and surgically removing this like a strand of unwanted DNA. In the same way, a virus can be repurposed from life threatening to health giving.

I’m very interested in the idea of places joining together in unusual ways to produce valuable effects. In one sense it’s no different from the old tradition of twinning cities, a beautiful idea often executed in the most dreary, unimaginative way possible, which is long overdue for a rethink. What could be more exciting than very different, very distant places and communities reaching out to each other to do extraordinary things together that have never been done before? Small island nations like the Faroes and the Maldives are perfect candidates for such things: I once suggested that Isla Mujeres (the Island of Women) in Mexico should get married to the Isle of Man in the United Kingdom.

Bradt’s Guides, a publisher of travel guides, decided to produce a fantasy guide to Shangri-La that year, and asked me to write a contribution to it.¹⁰ In my piece, I remarked how predictable it was that the strongest candidates for Shangri-La should always be tucked away somewhere in the fastnesses of the mysterious East. Why not in the equally mysterious North or West? Exoticism is purely a function of geographical distance, and the myth of Shangri-La happens to be located in the East only because that was as far away as you could get from the homelands of the Europeans who invented it. But since the significant economic, political, cultural, and social power of the next decades and centuries probably lies not in Europe but in India and China, I argued that the truly exotic, truly idyllic Shangri-La for our modern age might just as well be the Faroe Islands.

As for enhancing the global image of the Faroes, I’d more or less decided what my advice would be on that score an hour after landing at Vágar Airport on my first visit to the islands. This was a place that everybody on earth should visit at least once in their life: as soon as I stepped out of the airport, my jaw dropped to the ground and didn’t fully close again until I drew the curtains in my hotel bedroom that night.

So, as with Latvia, I begged them to indulge in no more grandiose talk about “national standing,” still less “nation branding.” The jewel in the Faroes’ crown, something its own citizens were so used to they barely noticed, was the islands themselves, their culture, their language and history, their people, their way of life. This is a niche tourist destination to die for, and that, I suggested, was what they should focus on promoting and what they should spend their money on building.

I’m glad to say that each year when I’m invited to the celebrations for Faroese Flag Day at their London representation, the Faroese officials tell me that they’re still promoting sustainable tourism, it’s really working, and it’s becoming a more and more valuable driver for their economy. A friend recently sent me a photo of what has to be the most stunning but modest new building I’ve seen in decades, the Eysturkommuna Town Hall: The Faroes are beginning to acquire quite a reputation for world-class modern architecture. Tourist numbers were up (at least prior to spring 2020), and Atlantic Airways has even upgraded its elderly BAe 146 jets to brand-new Airbus A319 and 320 aircraft, and finally extended the runway: all too late for me, but at least the Faroese citizens will leave home and arrive back again in a somewhat more relaxed state than before.