In the 1920s, Europeans developed two competing visions for radio broadcasting. On the one hand, commercial broadcasters and advertisers saw radio primarily as a profitable form of entertainment and a means of promoting goods and services. Proponents of national public broadcasting, on the other hand, argued that radio waves should be a truly public resource—isolated from the market, supported by listener license fees, and used for the more noble goals of educating and uplifting the national public. Although most historians have approached the battle between these two visions as a national phenomenon, it was in fact international from the very beginning in Europe, where broadcasts so easily crossed national borders. It became particularly acute after 1930, when a group of French commercial broadcasters began building a high-powered, long-wave station in Luxembourg capable of broadcasting advertisements and popular entertainment programs across Europe in multiple languages. Proponents of national public broadcasting turned to international organizations like the International Telecommunication Union and the International Broadcasting Union to force Radio Luxembourg off the air and establish national public broadcasting as the European norm. While they were unsuccessful in silencing Radio Luxembourg, all but five European states adopted national public broadcasting by 1935 and it would remain the European norm for several decades.

The story of Radio Luxembourg complicates our understanding of the relationship between transnational media and the power of the nation-state. International radio broadcasting has generally been considered a threat to national sovereignty—instrumental, for example, in undermining Soviet-bloc governments during the Cold War. If this is true, however, it was only because after World War II the hegemonic powers in Western Europe were willing to give radio that power. Before the war, by contrast they worked together internationally to try to limit broadcasts to national boundaries and give states jurisdiction over broadcasts that reached national audiences from the outside. At the same time, in any era, transnational media organizations like Radio Luxembourg need nation-states to enable and shelter their operations. Radio Luxembourg could broadcast internationally in defiance of European norms only because the Luxembourg government successfully refused to adopt them.