Building Bridges Across Europe
Fragmentation is synonymous with diversity, and it should be our strength!
There’s no shortage of interesting thinkers in Europe and beyond. The reason we don’t know most of them is not that their ideas are uninspiring. Rather, it’s that these ideas are expressed in one of Europe’s many languages, and most Europeans who could be interested in them speak a different language.
Surprisingly, even when it comes to English-speaking thinkers sharing their ideas in English, it will fall on deaf ears in large European countries such as France, Germany and Spain. Here’s why: the local media are too focused on local issues; the publishing market is too fragmented; and many locals, however educated, don’t understand English anyway. As Nicolas Colin once wrote about France,
In general, the French language acts as a barrier keeping the French immune to ideas from the outside. There is a tiny group at the margins that looks for new ideas in books written in English. But for a book to be widely read in Paris, first you need to convince a local publisher to fund a translation, and then you need to convince local journalists to cover it despite its lack of a French-speaking author. Needless to say, most global thinkers that are top-of-mind in London, New York, or Silicon Valley are completely unknown in Paris.
And so this is the situation we’re confronted with in Europe: the fragmentation from a language perspective makes it difficult to share ideas across borders and to have conversations at the continental level. This is a loss for everyone, not just an elite clique of people interested in intellectual novelty:
Policymakers say they’re looking for new ideas, but the fragmentation of Europe makes them unaware of interesting stuff discussed across the border.
Prominent European thinkers end up being more popular in the US than they are in their own continent, which makes them less interested in European matters.
Europe barely exists at an intellectual level, if only because Europeans don’t realize there are interesting discussions happening in other European countries.
I’ve designed Building Bridges to try and remedy that problem. This is the English-speaking branch of a broader platform—one on which I (and soon, others) will interview prominent global thinkers in their native language on a podcast, turn the audio file into a transcript, translate that transcript into as many European languages as possible, and distribute the translated versions across a syndication network covering as large a part of the continent as possible.
I’m starting with English-speaking countries (through Building Bridges 🇬🇧), France 🇫🇷 (through Nouveau Départ, the media platform Nicolas and I launched in April), and, soon, Germany 🇩🇪 (where I’m about to move with my family, so it’ll be easier to connect with local thinkers then). At some point, I hope to find correspondents in other large European countries such as Spain and Italy to help me spot interesting local thinkers and operate the local podcast channel in their native language.
The stakes are high. As the world is fragmenting at an accelerated pace, Europe needs to find its own voice between the US, China, and other regions of the world. I’m convinced we can only find our voice if we manage to turn cultural and linguistic fragmentation, a typically European feature, into an asset.
Fortunately, the Internet makes it easier to connect individuals with one another. Now, with platforms such as Substack, it has become easier to produce and distribute content. And with powerful tools such as Deepl and Google Translate, it has become faster and cheaper to translate any content into as many languages as necessary. Well, Europe has 24 of them, and we can start with the most spoken across the continent!
Please join me in that effort and stay tuned for our first podcast episode to be published (and translated) in only a few weeks! Subscribe to Building Bridges 👇