Is Europe a Joke?

This event is half investigation and half launch party. Is Europe a joke? Writers, editors, scholars and commentators will take up this many-sided provocation, at a key moment in that joke’s history. An idea of Europe that is imbued with humor, mockery, satire, burlesque—that idea is one of war’s casualties, as war washes ironies away, and a rival epic floods the frame. How to sustain the joke, to nurture the literature that enlivens it? Modern Ukrainian literature, it is said, begins with a satire of the Aeneid, written in 1798. Must every epic generate a mock-epic? We may need such terms (not to mention tragedy and farce) to narrate the geopolitical moment through which we are living.

If Europe is a joke, who gets it? Jokes, as conventional wisdom has it, are untranslatable, and yet a European culture is only ever found in translation. And when does a joke take on geopolitical import? Sweeping geopolitical narratives claim to explain the current moment, presume to encompass Europe and non-Europe, and yet tell us very little about the complexities of the present. Humor is a worthy scalpel.

Such questions about narrative and language nourish the ERB (The European Review of Untranslatable Jokes?); Issue Three, book-length and fresh from the printer, will be on hand for toasts and condemnations, while our panel of discussants will offer insights into “Europe” beyond the epic.

About the speakers

George Blaustein is a founder and editor of the European Review of Books, and a senior lecturer in history and American Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Oksana Forostyna is the Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), Opinion Editor at Ukraina Moderna, Visegrad Insight Fellow, author and book publisher.

Kalypso Nicolaidis is Chair in Global Affairs at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute, where she also convenes the EUI Democracy Forum. She is currently on leave from the University of Oxford and was professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at Ecole Nationale d’Admistration, Paris. 

Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard U Press, 2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy(Basic Books, 2020). His next book is Collision: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability. It is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in March 2024.

Isabelle Schwarz is Head of Public Policy at the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), in Amsterdam. Her professional interests connect EU policy influence, philanthropy, and international cultural relations.  

Luiza Bialasiewicz is a political geographer and Professor of European Governance in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is the Academic Director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies. 

The European Review of Books

The European Review of Books is a magazine of culture and ideas, in print and online, in English and in a writer’s own tongue. No review of books reviews only books, nor does it merely review. The ERB publishes many kinds of writing—fiction, travelogue, provocation, parody, poem, come what may—and generally champions the essayistic mode. Culture in Europe filters through national and metropolitan sieves; channeling a new, critical république des lettres, the ERB endeavors to cultivate writing beyond the nation and the metropole, and to thicken the “European” intellectual atmosphere.