EU Scream

Sedate and unflashy international institutions are in a struggle for attention in this new age of spectacle. In a step change aimed at addressing the challenge, the European Commission, the EU's executive body, last year paid a group of content creators around €100,000 for making videos about free movement across national borders under the Schengen Agreement. This month it emerged that the European Council, which organizes EU leaders' meetings, will invite social media influencers to summits starting this summer. The initiatives are acknowledgement that the dynamics of political communications have changed with the rise of social media, which demands high levels of emotionality and relatability. In this episode, Peter Van Aelst, a professor at the University of Antwerp and a prominent media commentator, shares his findings on the increasingly demonstrative tone used by politicians over the past 15 years. Negative emotions like anger are prevalent—especially among radical right and hard-left parties. But the findings also show politicians using more positive messaging as a strategy to foster goodwill as well as capture attention. One example is Bart De Wever, the Belgian prime minister, who has become a sensation on Instagram by posting videos with his cat Maximus. That has helped soften his hardline Flemish nationalist image. At the level of the EU, questions remain about the authenticity and effectiveness of paid influencer content and about whether it could eventually veer into propaganda. There also are calls to regulate outside influencers to ensure they aren't being paid by hostile actors. Yet another concern is reliance for distribution of influencer content on opaque US platforms owned by multinationals like Meta and X that are aligned with the Trump administration's hostility to European digital standards and regulations.
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Energy prices have exploded as a result of the Trump Administration's war on Iran. It's another opportunity for Europe to shield itself against the kind of fossil fuel shock that hit four years ago when Russia curtailed gas supplies to Europe. There are some positive signs. Frank Elderson, a key figure at the European Central Bank, is calling fossil fuels a severe threat to the stability of the financial system. The defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary removes a vehemently pro-fossil voice from the European Council. And then there's the upcoming Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels co-organized by The Netherlands and Colombia. But there's also a strong risk this moment will be wasted. Governments are shoveling tax breaks at drivers and diminishing the incentive to change behavior, and there's stiff resistance to an EU-level windfall tax on excess fossil fuel profits. Meanwhile Germany is mulling keeping coal connected longer than planned, and Italy has sought to suspend the Emissions Trading System that underpins the entirety of EU climate policy. In this episode: a conversation with Bas Eickout, a prominent Dutch lawmaker. Bas is co-leader of the Greens group at the European Parliament and, as a member of the chamber's governing body, among its dozen most influential figures. Bas describes how he's pushing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on electrification targets so as to ensure the current crisis doesn't go to waste. He also discusses the European politicians who share ownership for the crisis by impeding the transition from fossil dependency. Among the candidates: Kadri Simson, Jörgen Warborn, Manfred Weber, Fernand Kartheiser, and Mark Rutte. But there's also the question of how the Greens themselves should play this moment. For years Greens have been a punching bag for the far-right's culture wars. And although polls consistently show voters favor climate-friendly policies, that's not translated into widespread victories at the ballot box. To improve their electoral performance, Bas's own Green-Left party is forming a new party, Progressive Netherlands, with the Dutch social democrats. But Bas says similar tie-ups are unlikely, at least for now, in other EU countries.
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Tech bros like to blabber about AI and the end of the world. But the more plausible catastrophe they'll unleash is severe inequality and economic distress. As anger and panic grows over the automation of labor, the technology industry is casting around for a new social license to operate. One vogueish idea is some form of Universal Basic Income, or UBI: a regular cash income paid to all, on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. The most important experiment to date into how a basic income could work was funded by Sam Altman of OpenAI, the organization that developed ChatGPT. One thousand people in the US states of Illinois and Texas were given $1,000 a month obligation free between 2020 and 2023. But Altman's vision for how the new-look social assistance would work is deeply flawed. That's the verdict of Philippe Van Parijs, the celebrated philosopher and author of a landmark book on basic income (Harvard, 2017). Altman's recent proposals, where the public gets a share of a promised AI bonanza in exchange for innovation without limits, would fail to protect the public against the vicissitudes that a basic income is meant to address. In this live recording from the Flagey theater in Brussels, Philippe sets out the history and philosophy of an idea that has stirred thinkers and social-justice advocates for half a millennium, from 16th-century Flanders to 21st-century Silicon Valley. Among the figures featured in the show: Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives; Belgian social theorist Joseph Charlier; Louisiana Governor and US Senator Huey Long; bandleader Ina Ray Hutton; economist John Kenneth Galbraith; and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. With special thanks to Hywel Jones for musical accompaniment, Paulo Cotrim for production, and Diana Dzjamaldaeva for sound engineering.
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European leaders are failing to pushback against racist messaging from the Trump Administration, signaling their acceptance of a new geopolitics of whiteness. Among the most recent examples is a standing ovation for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference after he celebrated the colonial era and reprised warnings about a so-called civilizational erasure of Europe by migrants. The stated reason for the clapping in Munich was the softer tone on Europe taken by Rubio compared to that taken by US Vice President JD Vance a year earlier. In reality, the governing elites in Europe have a good deal more in common with the Trump Administration than most would care to admit. For one, Washington and Brussels both are seeking to justify a radical expansion of migration and asylum policies that brutalize large numbers of black and brown people inside and outside their borders. The difference is that the Europeans have historically sought to obfuscate such actions, says Emmanuel Achiri of the European Network Against Racism. By contrast the Trump Administration bluntly advertises its brutality by announcing ICE operations in racialized communities and posting white supremacist memes to official social media channels. In this episode: Emmanuel unpacks the origins of whiteness in Europe and North America; he examines the use whiteness by the Trump Administration as a main plank of US foreign policy; and he explains how violence on Europe's borders is often effectively invisibilized in what amounts to a form of necropolitics.
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Germany and Sweden are among states deploying troops to Greenland. Yet Trump's power play for the island in the wake of his Venezuela raid has left much of Europe bewildered. As author and historian Luuk van Middelaar observes, the continent's geostrategic vulnerability has barged, uninvited, into view, and Europeans now are confronting the possibility of being pushed to the margins of a newly assertive American empire and left powerless. It’s the type of situation Luuk identifies as a Machiavellian Moment, a term borrowed from historian J.G.A. Pocock to describe the instant when polities must exchange lofty ideals, aimed at creating a more perfect future, for amoral strategies, to survive a perilous present. The EU "almost lived outside time," says Luuk, but now must contend with the prospect that “the EU no longer exists." Addressing its own mortality and meeting the Machiavellian Moment implies shedding a habitual, almost pedagogical approach to policymaking and favoring improvisation and action, such as converting car plants to armaments factories, creating a European Security Council, and moving ahead with a multinational presence on Greenland. The deployment, albeit tiny, for now, shows “strategic maturity” and should change "the calculus for Trump” by increasing the risk of an armed conflict with allies, says Luuk, who is founding director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics. Yet brinksmanship with the United States could hasten an unravelling of the NATO alliance. And other vexed questions loom. What becomes of a geopolitical European project that leans more toward Machiavelli than Monnet and is stripped of its higher ideals? And does an emboldened Europe risk reinvigorating a neo-colonialist mindset? 
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