The world's funniest superstate?

The Europeans | European news, politics and culture

Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer

News, Society & Culture, Politics

0.0 • 0 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The European Union is many things: an economic powerhouse, an improbably successful peace project, or a bureaucratic hellscape, depending on who you ask. Most people would probably agree on one thing that it isn’t: funny. So when Susanna Kierkegaard set out to write Sweden’s first genuinely entertaining book about the EU, many might have dismissed the idea as a fool’s errand. And yet she has somehow pulled it off.

This week, we call up Susanna to share some of the best bits from her book Superstaten : EU och framtiden, from the MEP who expensed 250 kilograms of chocolate to the Italian whose unpaid electricity bills changed the course of European law.

Susanna is a columnist for Aftonbladet. You can read her work here, and follow her on Instagram as well as TikTok.

This podcast was brought to you in cooperation with Euranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. But it’s contributions from listeners that truly make it all possible—we could not continue to make the show without you! If you like what we do, you can chip in to help us cover our production costs at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (in many different currencies), or you can gift a donation to a superfan. You can also donate via our website if you prefer. And finally: we'd also love it if you could tell two friends about this podcast. We think two feels like a reasonable number.

Produced by Katy Lee

Mixing and mastering by Wojciech Oleksiak

Music by Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

The Europeans is proudly produced using Europe’s own Hindenburg.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast has been produced in cooperation with Euronet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news.
0:11.4	But this podcast would not be possible without the incredibly generous support of our amazing listeners who donate a little bit each month at patreon.com forward slash Europeans podcast. Hello, welcome back to the Europeans.
0:48.5	I'm going to skip the bit where we talk about how hot it is.
0:51.4	Suffice to say, it is hot.
0:57.0	And yeah, I hope you're all staying as cool as possible, listeners. I've been staying cool in that typical Amsterdam way by jumping in
1:03.0	the rat-infested waters. Oh, lovely. Yeah, I mean, in general, I find it one of the most wonderful
1:09.1	things about living in this city that you can do that. But the other day, I went to jump in and saw a giant dead, swollen rat, like just where I was about to jump in. Welcome to Amsterdam. Yeah, I decided there was a line. Although my friends were all just like, well, it's fine, we'll jump in anyway. That's disgusting. Anyway, you wanted to not talk about how hot it's been.
1:30.3	I'm not doing very well at that.
1:32.3	But what are we actually doing here today?
1:34.3	Yeah, well, every now and then, we have a conversation with someone,
1:38.3	and after recording it, we think, oh God, like, how are we going to squeeze that into this 15-ish minute slot that we
1:46.2	normally reserve for our weekly interview? And yeah, this week was one of those weeks. And we have
1:51.3	therefore made the bold choice to chuck out the rest of the episode that we have planned for
1:56.6	this week and just focus on this one conversation because it was so rich and thought-provoking
2:02.7	and it went in so many different directions from European taxpayers' money being spent on
2:08.0	chocolate to an Italian man who refused to pay his electricity bill changing the course of
2:12.9	European law that we thought you know what this interview is enough for the entire episode.
2:18.1	Yes, so we're going to be joined by someone who has been grappling with a big question that
2:22.2	we also often grapple with on this show, the question of how to communicate about Europe
2:27.8	in a way that is actually engaging. We started making this podcast about nine years ago, in part because we felt like Europe
2:36.7	was only ever talked about in the media in very dry and serious terms. And because of that,
2:42.5	the vast majority of European citizens were not actually taking any notice of what was happening
	...

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