Last week thousands of Europeans glued themselves to their phone and television screens, eagerly awaiting an important result. In any other year, this scene would clearly indicate the FIFA World Cup, but, for once, it was not sport that captured attention across the globe, but Trump and Biden’s battle for the US presidency.
America dominates to the exclusion of all else. Compare the magnitude of the mass protests that poured out into the streets of London, Milan, Berlin, and Brussels in support of Black Lives Matter, to the outcry over the mass incarceration of Uighur Muslims in China, violations of human rights committed regularly across the Middle East, or, in a European capital itself, the horrifying beheading of Samuel Paty (which has elicited marches in France, but nowhere else in the Continent).
When casually interrogated, many of my contemporaries are quick to state imported definitions of racial inequality and police brutality in America, though not as prompt to catch my references to Poland’s new abortion law.
