During these two days, Wednesday and Thursday, participants will reflect on the historical precedents and tools for reformulating Europe’s new role in a particularly turbulent international context.
Seminar organised by the Berggruen Institute of California, in collaboration with the Peace and Conflict Institute of the University of Granada and the Euro-Arab Foundation.
Can Europe be a laboratory for a new planetary politics?
“If the European Union can be understood fundamentally as a project that came with the failure of European empires, can its world-historical role in the future be understood according to a different paradigm, as a civilisation of consent rather than an empire of force? What would be the modes and behaviours of Europe in its uniqueness that could give it this renewed universal role? Can Europe act, for example, as a space of exchange between competing civilisational claims and thus transform global clashes into mutual recognition and multilateral dialogue, or even co-creation?
While the war in Ukraine has put enlargement back on the European agenda as a matter of urgency, Europe has yet to develop a global narrative around the meaning of an enlarged Union. While the technical issues around decision-making structures within an enlarged Union are enormous, they risk displacing the essential underlying question of Europe’s meaning as it enlarges to 35 or more countries.
The meaning of the project needs to be rearticulated both internally – for the European citizenry – and externally – for other regions of the world – without explicit attention, the answer risks being dictated solely by a wartime context. Without explicit attention, the answer risks being dictated solely by a context of war. What would it take for Europe to articulate itself as a transformative global actor as it enlarges? What historical, philosophical and cultural resources must it mobilise, both from ‘core’ European countries and their peripheries? What historical precedents and forms of power are relevant to thinking about the future European configuration and shape?
