Elastic and Explosive Europe at a Time of War: How Can We Rethink European Cleavages and Linkages?
Abstract: Once upon a time, in 1989–1991, European elites and citizens seemed to know that Europe existed, and they hoped that the continent would get reunited. Since then, several map-making efforts have taken place. Changing lists of (often normative) cleavages and linkages have been drawn to portray the political, economic, and societal evolutions affecting the region. Today, however, attempts at comparing and contrasting intra-European experiences offer only limited access to the radical changes that are taking place in Europe. Where do democracies/authoritarian regimes start and end? Are foreign policy alignments reminiscent of a (new) Cold War? At stake is not the identification of dominant divisions/ties, similitudes/differences, etc. Rather, a central issue lies in our ability to abandon the classification-based modes of knowledge production inherited from the 18th century and to invent new ways of thinking about an era that is both elastic and explosive.
Keywords: Europe, cleavages, Far Right, hybrid war, social media platforms, knowledge
Prof. Dr. Nadège Ragaru, a historian and political scientist, is full Research Professor at Sciences Po Paris (France). Formerly, she was a Reid Hall Fellow at Columbia University and an Oxpo Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford. She has extensively researched the history, historiography, and memory of World War Two in Southeast Europe, the history of socialism in Southeast Europe, as well as identity dynamics in this region. She is also monitoring the development of the Far Right across Europe. Her last open access book, Bulgaria, The Jews and the Holocaust. On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative (RUP, 2023), appeared earlier in Bulgarian (2022) and in French (2020). Her current book project is dedicated to the visual history of socialism in Bulgaria.