Ambivalence of Europeanization: On the Influence of Conflict and Contingency in the Processes of "Making Europe"

The Roundtable Session aims at presenting and discussing an interdisciplinary understanding of Europeanisation as a plurality of contingent and ambivalent processes, referring both positively and negatively to modernity. In the light of today’s crises and tremors in Europe, we propose to investigate conflicts and contestations with regard to their possible role within those transformations, which in the past and present triggered Europeanisation. The central thesis of the panel is that Europeanisation can be understood as a set of manifold spatial, historical or temporal defined ambivalent processes, all referring to the premises of modernity. Especially in the European peripheries, these transformations consisted (and still consist) of the interaction, competition and negotiation about different understandings of Europe and modernity. Europeanisation and modernisation appear to be inescapably entangled: inasmuch as modernity is ambivalent in its core, so is Europeanisation. The ambivalence of the broad process stems from the ambivalent role and impact of its main drive: those conflicts of European modernisation which can be appointed as significant turning points in European history.

The main questions the panelists will discuss are: which kind of social, territorial or historical process characteristics of European transformations can be considered ambivalent in their intentions and outcomes? What are crucial turning points or “tilting figures” in European history and present which can serve as lenses to unmask these ambivalent transformations? Which kind of peculiar ambivalences might have produced European conflicts and crises? When and how were conflicts and crises transformed into emergent or new European values, norm or practices?