What the comparison between the Azores and the Canary Islands reveals about insularity, solidarity, and the unfinished promise of Europe
There are maps that deceive us. They suggest that geography is fixed, impartial, and inevitable, as though the ocean itself were destiny. Yet history repeatedly teaches the opposite. The sea does not determine the fate of islands nearly as much as the political imagination of those who govern them. Distance is a fact of geography; disadvantage is often a matter of public policy.
Across the Atlantic, two archipelagos rise from the same oceanic frontier. The Azores and the Canary Islands share volcanic origins, fragmented territories, strategic locations, and the same constitutional recognition within the European Union as Outermost Regions, protected under Article 349 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Brussels acknowledges that both live with permanent structural disadvantages born of isolation, insularity, distance from continental markets, and the unavoidable costs of moving people and goods across thousands of kilometers of ocean.
Yet while nature has given them similar circumstances, politics has written remarkably different stories.
The comparison between the Azores and the Canaries is therefore not merely an economic exercise. It is, above all, a meditation on how societies choose to understand fairness. It asks whether the burden of geography should be carried primarily by the individual entrepreneur or shared collectively by the nation whose borders these islands help define.
The ocean itself offers no answer. Governments do.
For centuries, islands have lived according to a paradox. Everything that sustains life must eventually arrive by sea, yet the sea that connects them to the world also imposes an invisible tax upon every loaf of bread, every bag of cement, every machine part, every carton of milk, every exported product and every imported necessity. Maritime freight is never simply a transport cost. It is a silent companion attached to nearly every economic decision made on an island.
The question has always been who should pay that price. Spain answered that question decades ago through the Economic and Fiscal Regime of the Canary Islands, constructing a system in which the State absorbs a significant portion—and in some circumstances nearly all—of the cost of transporting goods between the islands and continental markets. The philosophy is simple yet profound: insularity should never become a permanent economic handicap. Geography may be immutable, but public policy can soften its consequences.
Portugal has approached the same reality differently. In the Azores, maritime freight remains largely embedded within the costs borne directly by businesses themselves. Public intervention focuses primarily on ensuring regular shipping services, maintaining port infrastructure, and supporting operational continuity. The transportation itself, however, largely remains a business expense, eventually reflected in the prices paid by producers, exporters, retailers, and ultimately consumers.
Both approaches exist within the same European legal framework. Yet they embody two distinct understandings of solidarity. One views insularity as a collective responsibility. The other leaves much of its economic weight resting upon individual enterprise. The difference may appear technical until one considers its cumulative effect.
A single shipping container crossing the Atlantic represents more than a freight invoice. Multiplied across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of annual shipments, transport becomes one of the defining variables determining whether a company expands or hesitates, hires or postpones, exports or retreats. Every additional euro spent moving goods is one less euro available for wages, innovation, technology, marketing, or investment.
Competitiveness is rarely lost through dramatic failures. More often, it disappears through countless small disadvantages accumulated over time.
The dairy industry understands this perhaps better than any other sector. So too do fisheries, food processing, construction, wholesale commerce, manufacturing, and every business whose economic life depends upon crossing the sea before reaching its customers. Islands do not simply compete through the quality of what they produce; they compete through the cost of bringing those products into the marketplace.
When transport becomes significantly more expensive, excellence alone cannot always overcome geography. The discussion therefore extends far beyond economics. It touches the deeper meaning of territorial cohesion.
The European project has long insisted that no citizen should face structural disadvantages simply because of where he or she happens to live. That philosophy explains why Article 349 exists in the first place. Europe recognized that its outermost regions could never compete on identical terms with continental territories without differentiated public policies capable of offsetting permanent geographic constraints.
The principle itself enjoys broad consensus. Its application remains remarkably diverse. The comparison between the Azores and the Canary Islands illustrates that identical legal foundations do not necessarily produce identical political choices. European law creates possibilities. National governments determine how fully those possibilities are embraced.
This distinction matters enormously. For island economies, geography cannot be negotiated. Freight costs cannot simply disappear through greater efficiency alone. No entrepreneur, regardless of talent or determination, can shorten the Atlantic Ocean. Public policy can. Or at least it can decide how much of that unavoidable burden should be carried collectively.
Business organizations throughout the Azores have repeatedly argued that logistics remain among the greatest structural obstacles to competitiveness, internationalization, and investment. Their concern is not merely about reducing operational costs; it is about creating conditions in which entrepreneurship is rewarded for innovation rather than penalized by geography.
This becomes particularly significant as the global economy grows increasingly interconnected. Supply chains have become more fragile, transportation costs more volatile, and competition more intense. In such an environment, structural disadvantages that once seemed manageable become increasingly consequential.
The discussion is therefore not about privileging islands. It is about allowing islands to compete fairly.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson offered by comparing these two Atlantic archipelagos. Their differences do not arise from volcanic landscapes, prevailing winds, or distances to Europe. They arise from differing political philosophies concerning the relationship between the State, the market, and territorial cohesion.
One model treats insularity primarily as an economic condition. The other increasingly understands it as a shared national responsibility.
Reasonable people may debate which approach ultimately proves more efficient, more sustainable, or more appropriate. Such debates belong to democratic societies and deserve thoughtful analysis rather than ideological certainty. But the comparison itself illuminates an essential truth often overlooked in discussions about island economies.
The greatest challenge facing islands has never been the ocean itself. The Atlantic has always been there.
The real question has always been how nations choose to respond to it. Because geography creates distance. Policy determines whether that distance becomes opportunity or disadvantage.
And in the end, the future of island communities may depend less upon the waters that surround them than upon the collective imagination of those who decide whether the cost of living on the edge of Europe should remain the burden of the few—or become the shared responsibility of the many.
Adapted from a story in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director. The photos are also from DI.