Thanks to everyone who braved the torrential rain to come to my book reading in Barcelona lat night! It was my first book event outside Brussels (more to come - check out the events page for updates) and it was a really great discussion getting the Spanish perspective on the latest news developments and Pedro Sanchez’s growing prominence in being the voice of European resistance.
We talked a lot about what’s happening with the Iran War and whether this is the moment when Europe says enough is enough with the Trump appeasement. The Spanish prime minister may have been the only European leader to come out in opposition to the war at first, but since then several have followed. Even Europe’s super-Atlanticist conservatives Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni have started to back off of their initial moral support for the war. But we’ve seen this story before with Greenland. Just when you think European leaders have grown a spine, Trump backs off and our leaders convince themselves that everything’s gone back to normal.
The difference this time, as we discussed at the reading, is that even if Donald Trump backs off it’s almost certainly too late. The genie is out of the bottle and Europeans are about to suffer the calamitous impacts of this war even if Trump declares a fake victory tomorrow. The only thing yet to be determined is just how bad this is going to get. As Europeans feel this pain, will they turn their wrath on their own leaders who have spent the past year betraying them in order to appease the US president? That’s the big question we had in the room last night.
We started with a reading from the book’s prologue where I explained how the 2003 Iraq War motivated me to emigrate to Europe at the start of 2007, having read books about the potential of the EU to become a superpower while I was working as a reporter on Capitol Hill in Washington. Needless to say, I’m having a lot of deja vu right now. I think many of us are.
The audience was particularly interested in the subject of America’s cultural domination, and I heard from a few people they had never thought before about how little they know about the pop culture of their neighbouring European countries. In the book I write that most Europeans consume only two types of pop culture (music, TV, movies and news media): their own country’s, and America’s. American culture has thus become the shared culture of Europeans, the subject that people from two different EU member states can bond over. In the book I make a controversial recommendation: European producers should think about producing things in English (where appropriate) if they want to have the whole of Europe as an audience. English is, after all, Europe’s cultural lingua franca now (spoken by more than half of EU citizens).
The next book reading will be at Librebook book store in Brussels on 24 March. I will be interviewed by Jakob Hanke Vela, Brussels Bureau Chief for the German newspaper Handelsblatt and former author of Politico Playbook. We’ll also be taking questions from the audience. Click here to register. And stay tuned for further announcements about upcoming readings in London and Berlin.
