Abstract

Dramas from the Greek debt crisis to the so-called refugee crisis and Brexit powerfully reveal the breakdown of a shared sense of “Europe”—both in terms of its meaning and its value as a common political project—precariously constructed over the past few decades. With the collapse of an overarching narrative of progress towards “an ever closer union”, space has been opened for older visions of, for and about Europe to be heard as well as for new visions to emerge and to circulate. These connecting and competing discursive manifestations range from pleas to renew the prior consensus to dreams of renegotiating Europe from the ground up or of retreating from it altogether into more “traditional” and “natural” units based on nationality, ethnicity or religion. Such demands come from many different actors within Europe and outside of its borders. As these actors express (new) social imaginaries, they also, more or less self-consciously, and on larger or smaller scales, convene publics around their visions—engaging in struggles to realize imaginaries in the political and social realms, to bring into being a European space or set of spaces that suits their needs and desires. With this in mind, the two-day seminar will explore these dynamics from a variety of discursive, thematic and historical perspectives  , in response to the excessive presentism that seems to underlie much contemporary research on these various European “crises.”