CRASSH

Complexities of ‘Europe’: Between knowledge, power, citizenship and identity

Conference Review

a) Summary Abstract

The conference set out to explore the complexities of the multifaceted ways in which “Europe” as a concept, a label, a place, an institution or a union is turned into a locus of contestation. The presented papers and the discussions that followed them fostered a vivid exchange of various disciplinary gazes which made more tangible these different ‘Europes’. Highlighting the construction of a “European” imagination though history and re-interpretations of cultural heritage; disclosing alternative vision and projects for a ‘different’ Europe, exploring the political challenges of memory between the national and the European, questioning the policies of borders and immigration or explaining  the different effects of diffusion of the European politics between European ‘centres and peripheries’ but also towards wider space and geographies, the conference provided a rich intellectual ground in order to think and problematize ‘Europe’ beyond the political narratives of accession and integration.

b) Conference Review

Aims and intellectual content

The aim of the conference was to explore the implications of the circulation of the name “Europe” in contemporary sociopolitical contexts beyond the political narratives of accession and integration. Standing critical to theoretical approaches to “Europe” which often suggest a teleological narrative, which portrays the establishment of the European Union as the consummation of every cultural and political project of “Europeanness”, this conference aimed at disclosing multiplicity, stimulating questions and highlighting the paradoxes of discourses circulating around “Europe”. In this respect instead of defining “Europe”, the conference aimed at providing the platform for a critical exchange of ideas between different approaches and different definitions. In this respect, we set out to explore the complexities of the multifaceted ways in which “Europe” as a concept, a place, a ‘culture’, a history, but also as a legal label, an economical and political institution or a union is turned into a locus of contestation.

The second purpose of the conference was to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue. This has been one of the main aims of the ‘European Identities and Encounters’ graduate research group from its very first meetings in 2008 organized under the hospitable umbrella of CRASSH. The impulse for this conference was the outcome of a highly creative year of seminars, lectures and reading sessions organized by the group, where interdisciplinarity was actively promoted. In this terms we believe that it has been more than fortunate the fact that young, advanced and distinguished scholars from the entire range of social sciences and humanities participated, including political science, history, social/cultural anthropology, archaeology, media studies, management, history of art, linguistics, discourse theory, literature, sociology and geography.

Main Issues

The conference’s first day included papers from the disciplinary fields of history, sociology, social anthropology, media studies, gender studies and architecture. In the first panel entitled “Imagi-nations: “Europe” in the making”, the presenters analysed a variety of representations of ‘Europeanness’ and tried to develop a nuanced conceptualization of the making of European identities. They probed the limits of Europe, pointing out that the history of Europeanisation focuses on the post-1945 period and the continent of Europe, neglecting how 'Europeanness' was constructed beyond this region. For instance, ‘Eurafrique’ as a common colonial project of various European forces, including France and Germany in the interwar period, was analysed in depth. The other line of argument developed in this panel had to do with Europeanisation as a conflictual process. The clash of a broad range of political languages in national and transnational institutions in Europe was stressed, such as the varying meanings assigned to ‘multiculturalism’ in France and Britain.

The second panel, titled “Politics of Knowledge” touched upon the possibilities and predicaments of the European arena in relation to the circulation and exchange of knowledge. On the one hand the focus was directed to the terms in which EU structures facilitate and at the same time regulate academic mobility. A special reference was made to the different projects for gender mainstreaming within the European research sphere and their checks and balances. On the other hand, interesting research results were presented about the governmentality of knowledge transference though the regional innovation strategy projects and the regimes of hierarchies and conflicts which these projects resulted to while the European ‘center’ specialists would export knowledge to the new EU states.

Our third panel conversed round issues of “Memory and Culture”. Panelists from across Europe considered issues of the use of sites of traumatic heritage and the conflict between local memory and a Europeanized sphere of consumption of culture. The panelists also explored case studies about the effect of European funding in the definitions of national and local cultural heritage, and highlighted the  political element in representations of 'Europe' in contemporary art exhibits and forms of urban architecture.

The key note lecture of the first day addressed by Professor Gerard Delanty and titled “Interpreting the European Heritage” explored the different political opportunities offered by the hitherto various narratives about “Europe”. After a critical presentation of a set of narratives promoting a viable European identity, Professor Delanty proposed a different way of imagining Europe. Instead of focusing on an all-inclusive definition of a European self or a rigid distinction between a ‘self’ and an ‘other’, we should try to reconfigure these very categories as impure, since the one exists within the other, and thus promote a new post-European, cosmopolitan notion of Europeaness.  

The second day included papers from political theory and science, discourse theory, social anthropology, philosophy of law and international relations perspective.

The first panel titled “‘Europe’ inside out: Politics of governance” focused on the ways in which the production of politics and political discourses at the center of EU decision making produces effects which one the one hand are transmitted in unpredictable and contingent ways towards their target or, on the other hand, diffuse towards a wider geographical map creating regimes of power that exceed the European political borders. In this respect “Europe” was put under the presenter’s analytical perspective as an exporter of normative discourses on human rights, gender and peace  though the funding of NGOs, establishment of offices, neighboring policies, organization of projects, exporting of know-how. The panelists presented different case studies i.e. the project for stabilizing peace in Kosovo, the promotion of human rights in Egypt through the neighboring policy structures, the accountability reforms in Latvian public sector and the flow of European funds through projects into Romania, showing that in all cases issues of political contestation, regimes of power and the complexity of a discursive construction of sociopolitical reality should be taken into account.

The fifth panel, titled ‘Debating citizenship and participation’ centered on issues of construction of the political in and in relation to Europe. Some presenters explored different ways through which a political sphere in Europe can be imagined, looking either at alternative pluralistic philosophical projects or questioning the role of communication. The last paper of the panel investigated the relations between political practices in contemporary Turkey, discourses of cosmopolitanism and the aspirations for the country’s accession to EU.

The final panel of the second day titled “frontiers set, frontiers crossed: Immigration and minorities” disclosed and problematized the way in which European countries and the EU deal with and regulate the migration phenomenon, i.e. with the fact that ‘Europe’ has become the center of aspiration and desire for a better living for millions of people worldwide but at the same time a place of multiple borders and frontiers which are imposed against them. The last paper of the panel focused on the paradoxes of belonging during a period when the European borders are moving through EU’s expansion and produce new divisions between a European / non-European frontier.

The key note lecture of the second day was given by Dr. Henk van Houtum, titled “the Abducted and Gated Europe”. The main argument of Dr. van Houtum pointed to the fact that aspirations for a different Europe have been delimited by the historically specific articulation of Europe as equating to the EU. This “abduction” of Europe and its procrustean fitting into the economic and security standards of an institutional logic has given birth to a set of policies for the regulation of the frontiers which produce regimes of extreme exclusion. In order to rethink these we have to rethink and re-envisage “Europe”

Plans for follow-up events and publications

Regarding a possible publication, the organizing committee is already in contact with the European Review Journal exploring the case of a publication of a selection of conference papers. The abstracts of the selected papers have already been accepted by the journal editor and final drafts of the papers are expected to be delivered in late March 2010.

Regarding follow up events, the European identities and encounters research group, completed a first trajectory of its work with this two-day graduate conference The outcome of the vibrant exchanges of critical ideas at the conference among scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical background in the social sciences and the humanities turned the attention of the group to the significance of the debate on the affective elements of identification. Thus, the group decided to launch a new series of reading sessions for Lent term 2010 where we will be reviewing literature relating to affect(s). The main aim is for these reading sessions to serve as a theoretical background for pushing our interdisciplinary focus one step further towards a critical understanding of identification procedures as well as the passions, fantasies and attachments involved in the elaborations, developments or failures of politics of/in Europe. This term’s reading sessions will eventually lead to a series of presentation of graduate research case studies or invited scholar’s work during Easter term 2010.

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