As a European, this article is the degree of pretentious, market-driven, and shallow, that fits perfectly with the Economist.
"Streaming subtitled box sets" are not "the new Eurovision", and Eurovision itself meant and means squat when it comes to "common European culture". (If anything Eurovision is something most of us watch for laughs, and more often than not we take sides and vote for countries we already knew and liked for other cultural and historical reasons).
We have had and have a quite good understanding of other European states and their cultures, even more so when they share the same borders (as it's often the case in Europe - to have 2, 3 or more countries sharing your borders and have millenia of interaction with them and their culture, plus "shared" areas of mixed culture, e.g. Strasbourg).
It's not the lack of Netflix's European programming or watching each other's shows that prevented a "common European culture".
Not to mention, we have had something like that, both in the high-brow sphere (for centuries), but also in the pop-culture.
E.g. non-artsy Italian and French cinema from Alain Delon to Bud Spenser was big all-over Europe until the 80s when Hollywood dominated with emphasis on impossible to meet big productions and vfx. European pop music frequently travelled all over Europe, from Al Bano to Roussos and from Nina Hagen to Kraftwerk. Comics too, French, English, Italian, Belgian, Spanish (to namedrop some that were published and loved all over Europe: Asterix, Tin Tin, Mortadelo y Filemon, Lucky Luke, Blek, Judge Dredd, the Smurfs, Manara, Corto Maltese, and so on).
And as somebody mentioned, Interrail and Erasmus have been going strong for 3 to 4 decades now or more... (I've done the first, and have had many friends doing both the first and the second.).
I'm from the UK and loved my occasional childhood holidays in France or Portugal for a chance to buy Lucky Luke and Pink Panther comics. For some reason Asterix and Tintin were popular in the UK but other Franco-Belgian comics didn't take off. There were a few 70s prints of Lucky Luke and I have one translated 1970s Iznogoud but they went out of print quickly until Cinebook [0] started selling new translations about a decade ago, and the characters are much less well-known here than on the continent.
I think Gaston is still unavailable in English - I'm not such a fan of Spirou and Fantasio but I recently bought Cinebook's "The Marsupliami Thieves" as it was the only Franquin book available in English, sadly.
By the way, a recent HN thread on internationalization mentioned how few really well localized film translations there are and gave Shrek and Frozen as examples of good ones. The English translations of Asterix were brilliant and full of English-specific puns, presumably replacing original French puns (I have read some of them in French but my French is not really good enough for wordplay).
(edit: Although obviously the UK has its own tradition of kids-including-girls-friendly comics: Beano, Dandy, and many others. And for a modern equivalent I like the Phoenix comic [1]. But comic book shops here are mostly also very full of superhero comics and adult manga and not young-girl-friendly.)
Hacker Cinema
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As a European, this article is the degree of pretentious, market-driven, and shallow, that fits perfectly with the Economist.
"Streaming subtitled box sets" are not "the new Eurovision", and Eurovision itself meant and means squat when it comes to "common European culture". (If anything Eurovision is something most of us watch for laughs, and more often than not we take sides and vote for countries we already knew and liked for other cultural and historical reasons).
We have had and have a quite good understanding of other European states and their cultures, even more so when they share the same borders (as it's often the case in Europe - to have 2, 3 or more countries sharing your borders and have millenia of interaction with them and their culture, plus "shared" areas of mixed culture, e.g. Strasbourg).
It's not the lack of Netflix's European programming or watching each other's shows that prevented a "common European culture".
Not to mention, we have had something like that, both in the high-brow sphere (for centuries), but also in the pop-culture.
E.g. non-artsy Italian and French cinema from Alain Delon to Bud Spenser was big all-over Europe until the 80s when Hollywood dominated with emphasis on impossible to meet big productions and vfx. European pop music frequently travelled all over Europe, from Al Bano to Roussos and from Nina Hagen to Kraftwerk. Comics too, French, English, Italian, Belgian, Spanish (to namedrop some that were published and loved all over Europe: Asterix, Tin Tin, Mortadelo y Filemon, Lucky Luke, Blek, Judge Dredd, the Smurfs, Manara, Corto Maltese, and so on).
And as somebody mentioned, Interrail and Erasmus have been going strong for 3 to 4 decades now or more... (I've done the first, and have had many friends doing both the first and the second.).
I'm from the UK and loved my occasional childhood holidays in France or Portugal for a chance to buy Lucky Luke and Pink Panther comics. For some reason Asterix and Tintin were popular in the UK but other Franco-Belgian comics didn't take off. There were a few 70s prints of Lucky Luke and I have one translated 1970s Iznogoud but they went out of print quickly until Cinebook [0] started selling new translations about a decade ago, and the characters are much less well-known here than on the continent.
I think Gaston is still unavailable in English - I'm not such a fan of Spirou and Fantasio but I recently bought Cinebook's "The Marsupliami Thieves" as it was the only Franquin book available in English, sadly.
By the way, a recent HN thread on internationalization mentioned how few really well localized film translations there are and gave Shrek and Frozen as examples of good ones. The English translations of Asterix were brilliant and full of English-specific puns, presumably replacing original French puns (I have read some of them in French but my French is not really good enough for wordplay).
(edit: Although obviously the UK has its own tradition of kids-including-girls-friendly comics: Beano, Dandy, and many others. And for a modern equivalent I like the Phoenix comic [1]. But comic book shops here are mostly also very full of superhero comics and adult manga and not young-girl-friendly.)
[0] http://www.cinebook.co.uk [1] http://www.thephoenixcomic.co.uk/