‘Everyone comes to Brussels driven by revenge or love or both.” It might be news to those for whom the de facto EU capital is synonymous with vacuum cleaner regulations or food safety standards. But this is drama, not real life. The line is from the blurb for a glossy Dutch TV drama series, Brussels, which reimagines the city as a stage for intrigue and vicious power games.

Here is the self-satisfied EU commissioner, looking after her business interests while navigating political rivals and a past lover. Woven into the plot is a Russian-Ukrainian oligarch, an idealistic teenager dragged out of a mosque and a rough sleeper. The dialogue switches between Dutch, English, French and Russian, while the camera offers sweeping panoramas of the Belgian capital.

The show, a collaboration between the Dutch writer Leon de Winter and the Belgian director Arno Dierickx, is something of a rarity: a drama series set in the EU about the EU. “It is difficult to fall in love with the single market,” the former European commission president Jacques Delors once said. It is no easier to dramatise it. Despite decades of integration, the European project, which turns 60 this weekend, has rarely intruded into popular culture. The EU has a flag and an anthem, but has not fired the imaginations of writers and artists.

Aleksandr Lazarev as Viktor Petrenko in Brussels. Photograph: Johan Voets/Endemol Nederland/FBO

Even in shows about politics, Europe is a fleeting theme. In the Danish political drama Borgen, the EU rarely featured. An exception was an episode titled In Brussels, No One Can Hear You Scream, which involved getting rid of an opponent by making them the country’s EU commissioner.

Europe rarely cropped up in Yes Minister. Apart from jokes about Euro perks, the show did produce a memorable summary of Britain’s European policy. “Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years, to create a disunited Europe,” Sir Humphrey explains in an episode that aired in 1980, less than a decade after Britain joined. “We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside … now that we are inside, we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing.” There is a grain of truth in the satire: the British joined the common market to shape it in their interests.

The Borgen episode in which a troublesome opponent is sidelined to Brussels. Photograph: DR Fiktion

But these examples stand out because they are rare. While the Secret Service had James Bond, the EEC and its later incarnations never looked anything but dull. “The EU is seen as something boring and technical, and people forget that there are people behind it who set it up,” says Ingo Espenschied, a journalist and political scientist. Espenschied makes documentaries about politics, on subjects such as West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, or the history of the European project.

He reckons the EU is ripe for artistic exploitation. “If you look at the scenario [of European integration], it could be written by Hollywood. It has all the ingredients of a good story. France and Germany, who were enemies in history and became partners, the motor of Europe. It has something that has never been known before in history.”

When the EU has emerged in culture, though, it is not a Hollywood tale of triumph over adversity, but something darker. This is especially true in the British imagination, where Brussels is a den of intrigue and skullduggery. The British subgenre of dystopian Brussels flourished from the mid-1980s onwards, becoming more vivid as ferocious debates about the Maastricht treaty rocked the Conservative government.

The French president Charles de Gaulle and the German federal chancellor Konrad Adenauer at a pro-EU demonstration in 1962. Photograph: Imagno/Getty

One example is the 1995 anti-German potboiler by the Thatcherite historian Andrew Roberts, The Aachen Memorandum. The author described the book, set in 2015, as “a dystopian vision of what Britain might turn into if it became a minor satrapy of a vast, protectionist, illiberal, anti-American, politically correct EU”.



Roberts was not alone in mining the fictional seam of the EU as a murky bureaucracy with limitless ambitions. More than a decade later, the House of Cards writer Michael Dobbs imagined an obscure EU counterterrorism unit infiltrated by the Russians, cooking up a vast and murderous criminal plot, in his 2012 novel, A Sentimental Traitor.

A generation earlier, the British EU official and former MEP Stanley Johnson turned to Brussels as the setting for his thriller, The Commissioner. James Morton, a mid-ranking Tory minister out of favour with the prime minister, is packed off to Brussels to become Britain’s EU commissioner, where he stumbles across a giant conspiracy. The commission president is in cahoots with a German chemicals conglomerate that is secretly manufacturing Agent Orange and dumping toxic waste into the Rhine.

Unlike Roberts’s book, this is not a tale of the overbearing Brussels superstate crushing valiant Britain. Morton, the archetypal “decent” and ineffectual Englishman, is joined by “good” commissioners from Portugal, Ireland and Greece in fighting for the truth. One of the main villains is a treacherous British chief of staff planted by the British ambassador in Brussels to watch over the commissioner. Johnson dismisses the idea his book is dystopian. “Fiction is fiction,” he says. “If you are writing a thriller, you jolly well have to be readable.”

Stanley Johnson, writer of European conspiracy thriller The Commissioner. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty

Arguably the most memorable British fiction about Brussels was penned by Johnson’s son, Boris, now foreign secretary. In his earlier career as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Boris Johnson took the euromyths genre to new heights with stories that the EU planned to standardise condom sizes and ban prawn cocktail crisps.

Stanley Johnson, a lifelong supporter of the EU, is now writing a book about Brexit. But anyone looking for a thinly disguised account of the chatter around the family dinner table during the campaign might be disappointed. Kompromat imagines the Russians fixing the Brexit result. Stanley Johnson suggests his son the foreign secretary might have a walk-on role, perhaps as a character called Harry Stokes, “because he stokes up a lot of trouble”.

If the British invented the idea of the EU as the ultimate nightmare bureaucracy, other European countries hit on a different theme – the comedy of being neighbours. One example is the 2003 Franco-Spanish film L’Auberge Espagnole, a breezy tale about students on an EU Erasmus exchange programme sharing a flat in Barcelona. In English, it was almost given the unfortunate title Europudding, but was released as Potluck, to express the idea that each character (or nation) brings something to the party.

Breezy tale … L’Auberge Espagnole. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

The film is a paean to European integration: instead of fighting in the trenches, young Europeans squabble over space in the fridge and share seduction techniques. There is a safe and schmaltzy ending, when the hero Xavier chucks in a job offer at a French bank to become a writer.

Also in this genre is the 2010 French film Nothing to Declare (Rien à Déclarer). In this screwball comedy, two customs officers – one Belgian, the other French – who loathe each other are forced to work together to combat smugglers after immigration controls are lifted in 1993. It is the kind of banana-skin caper where someone loses their trousers and many of the mishaps depend on a spluttering Renault Sedan.

Although one character prays “Lord, kill the eurozone for ever” we know where the film-maker’s heart lies. It is intended as a gentle exposé of prejudice, and its director and star, Dany Boon, took inspiration from crossing the border between northern France and Belgium. He described “a real no man’s land – empty sentry boxes, boarded-up stores, abandoned homes” that he instantly saw was an “eminently cinematic setting”.

Spluttering Renault … screwball comedy Nothing to Declare. Photograph: Du Chicon/Rex/Shutterstock

But it’s not all slapstick comedy: the neighbours theme has been given a new twist with the multinational drama The Team, a police thriller where officers from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany join forces to hunt for a killer. “Criminals don’t stop at borders and neither should the police” is the tagline for the show, which could have been written by the real-life EU police agency Europol. A tense and often violent story about human trafficking, tax fraud and organised crime, the drama is a co-production between five European broadcasters. It also received a slice of EU funding.

In its way, the Dutch drama Brussels is trying to corner the same pan-European audience, who are interested in multilingual dramas and flawed characters grappling with moral dilemmas – rather than bent bananas.