Shemaine Bushnell Kyriakides
When people in Cyprus hear "Brussels," it can still sound like a place that exists somewhere far away; a world of speeches, regulations and political deals that has little to do with everyday life in Nicosia, Larnaca, Limassol or Paphos.
Stephen Clark has spent much of his career trying to close that gap.
Clark, a senior European Parliament official who oversees the Parliament’s liaison offices across the EU, has spent decades explaining Europe to Europeans. But when he talks about Cyprus, he does not describe it as a small member state sitting on the edge of the bloc. He describes it as one of the countries Europe should be listening to more carefully.
“Don’t let anyone tell you that this is somehow less Europe than anywhere else,” he said. “Brussels is no more Europe than Nicosia.”
It is a line that sounds almost like a rebuttal to a familiar Cypriot instinct, the feeling that the island is somehow far from the center of things. But Clark’s point is the opposite. In his view, Cyprus is not standing at the margins of Europe’s story. It is living many of the pressures that are likely to shape Europe’s future: instability in the region, questions of security, the battle over truth online, and the growing distrust people feel toward politics and institutions.
Making Europe feel less distant
Clark has worked in the European Parliament since 1991. Over the years, he moved into communications and later into digital outreach, helping launch the Parliament’s first social media platforms ahead of the 2009 European elections.
Today, he is in charge of the European Parliament’s liaison offices in member states, the local offices that try to explain what the Parliament is doing, what laws are being passed, and why any of it should matter to people in their own countries.
That is not always a straightforward task.
One of the EU’s long-running problems is that decisions may be taken in Brussels or Strasbourg, but by the time they filter down into daily life in a country like Cyprus, the link has often been lost. “National governments are usually happy to take credit for popular decisions while blaming 'Brussels' for the unpopular ones,” he says. The result is that the EU can end up looking distant and abstract, even when it has had a direct impact on the issue at hand.
Clark said that is why communication has to be local. The point is not simply to issue statements from Brussels but to explain European politics in a way that makes sense to people where they are, in language they understand and through examples that actually connect with their lives.
That matters in every member state, but in Cyprus, he suggested, the local context is especially important.
Cyprus is not just a small country on the edge
Clark returned more than once to Cyprus’s geography and to the fact that the island’s reality is not the same as that of many other EU countries.
The division of the island is one obvious part of that. So is Cyprus’s location, close to the Middle East and in a region where war, instability and migration are not distant headlines but part of the political environment.
He pointed to the recent drone incident as a reminder that Cyprus may be geographically far from Brussels, but it is close to the crises that are increasingly shaping Europe’s future.
In that sense, he argued, Cyprus has more in common than many might think with countries like the Baltic states, “…EU member states on the bloc’s outer edge that tend to have a much sharper instinct for security threats, disinformation, and geopolitical instability because they live closer to them.”
That is one of the more interesting things about the way Clark speaks about Cyprus. He does not frame it as a country looking toward Europe from the sidelines, hoping to be heard. He frames it as a country whose experience may actually help explain to the rest of Europe what is coming.
The growing battle over trust
If geography is one part of Clark’s thinking, trust is the other.
Having been involved in the European Parliament’s early push into social media, he has had a front-row seat to the way online politics has changed. What was once seen as a more open and democratic way of communicating has become something far messier, a space filled with misinformation, organized disinformation, rage, manipulation, and growing public cynicism.
“Artificial intelligence is likely to make that even harder to navigate,” he warned.
If people already struggle to know what is real online and what is not, AI could make that confusion far worse. But Clark’s concern goes beyond fake videos or fabricated images. The bigger problem, in his view, is that “people stop trusting anything at all.”
That, perhaps more than any individual lie, is the real danger of disinformation: not just that it persuades people of something false, but that it creates so much noise, suspicion, and fatigue that citizens eventually give up trying to work out what is true.
For democracy, that is toxic.
Clark believes institutions have to respond on several fronts: by supporting fact-checking, by understanding how false narratives spread, and by teaching younger generations to question what they are seeing online. “Why is this post making me angry? Why is it appearing in my feed? What is it trying to get me to believe?” These, he suggested, are the kinds of questions people increasingly need to ask.
Why old-fashioned contact still matters
For all the focus on digital communication, Clark still speaks like someone who believes politics works best when it feels human.
That is why the European Parliament increasingly tries to work not only through its own official channels but also through schools, civil society groups, volunteers, and other trusted voices who can help bring European issues to people who are unlikely ever to follow an EU institution online.
It is also why he still places such value on face-to-face contact. In an era dominated by screens, algorithms, and short-form outrage, Clark argues that in-person conversation still matters because it builds trust in a way digital communication often cannot.
That point feels particularly relevant in Cyprus, where public trust in institutions is often fragile and where European politics can still seem distant, even when it directly affects people’s lives.
Clark also acknowledged that Cyprus’s audience is not a simple one. The island has a growing English-speaking population alongside its Greek-speaking majority, and communication, he suggested, has to reflect that reality too. Reaching people means more than translating a message. It means speaking to them in ways that feel relevant, accessible, and grounded in their own experience.
Why Cyprus matters to Europe’s future
Clark was careful not to make sweeping judgments about Cyprus’s internal politics. But he was clearly positive about the country’s place inside the EU, including its handling of the rotating EU presidency during a difficult period marked by political turbulence and regional insecurity.
Smaller countries, he suggested, can sometimes perform these roles surprisingly well precisely because they do not have the luxury of imposing themselves. According to him, “…they have to negotiate, build consensus, and focus on getting things done.”
But the broader point he was making went beyond the presidency.
“Cyprus matters because it sits where many of Europe’s biggest pressures meet: instability in the Middle East, migration, security concerns, disinformation, and the wider question of how Europe protects itself in a more uncertain world. In that sense, Cyprus is not watching Europe’s future from afar. It is already living part of it.”
And that is what makes Clark’s final point land more strongly than it might first appear.
Cyprus may sit at the far eastern edge of the European Union on a map. But politically, strategically, and increasingly in everyday life, it is much closer to the center of Europe’s story than many people…both in Brussels and in Cyprus…still realize.
