Thanks to everyone who came to The Owned Continent book reading and Q&A at Librebook book store in Brussels tonight, it was a great conversation and I was really grateful for all the thoughtful questions from the audience.
The conversation was hosted by Jakob Hanke Vela, Brussels Bureau Chief for the German newspaper Handelsblatt and former author of Politico Playbook, who asked me why I wrote the book and why I’ve made the connection between Europeans’ consumption of American culture and the acceptance of a subservient attitude toward the United States. I noted that the idea first came from the reaction to a Substack post I wrote in May last year.
We also discussed current developments with the Iran War, how it compares to the Iraq War of 20 years ago, and what role the US bases in Europe are playing in the conflict. We stumbled upon a depressing reality. Unlike with the Iraq War (in which a majority of current EU countries participated), European countries aren’t participating in the Iran War simply because they weren’t asked. If Trump had asked them beforehand to build a coalition of the willing, many European countries probably would have felt obliged to join the effort. Now he’s belatedly asking them to join after he already launched the war without consulting them. But joining now, as one French general put it, would be like buying a ticket for the Titanic after it already started sinking.
We had some great questions from the audience which voiced frustration with our leadership in Europe and also made me think about K-pop in new ways! During the audience Q&A we discussed the Creative Europe MEDIA programme, an effort by the European Commission to support European culture that I wrote about in the book. I talked about why it never got off the ground, and we discussed whether the EU could ever support its producers of pop culture as much as it supports its farmers.
Stay tuned to the book’s events page for news about future readings in Brussels, London and Berlin!
