Elastic and Explosive Europe at a Time of War - Nadège Ragaru
Piron, Vol. 26, Walls, January 2025.
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.
