Description

Europe is not a completed entity but an evolving process shaped by negotiation, crisis, and reinvention. Its unfinished character has become increasingly visible in the context of authoritarian resurgence, ecological breakdown, and institutional fatigue. What appears as fragmentation may also indicate adaptability and creative potential.

The seminar examines the question: What might Europe become if imagined otherwise? Rather than predicting futures or cataloguing crises, the focus lies on theoretical frameworks that position imagination as both method and condition, a shared capacity to rethink political, social, cultural, and ecological systems under conditions of uncertainty. Perspectives on utopia as horizon, slowness as resistance, and planetary politics challenge anthropocentric paradigms, foregrounding interdependence and responsibility.

This same principle guides the seminar's own method: how disciplines move from multidisciplinary juxtaposition toward genuine pluridisciplinary exchange and how scholarly production is evaluated across that shift.

Part of the answer, in turn, lies in an archaeology of how the future has been imagined before. For three centuries, imagining the ideal society meant imagining it nowhere: Plato's Republic, More's island, Campanella's City of the Sun, Andreae's Christianopolis all stage a perfect polity that belongs to no real place. In the eighteenth century that changes. Mercier dreams the year 2440, Kant designs a federation of republics, Saint-Simon plans the reorganisation of European society: the imagined future finally gets an address, Europe, and from this point the continent's future and its identity are written together, down to a Commission that now calls itself geopolitical and a Green Deal that speaks in civilizational terms.

Its object, throughout, is the shared cultural imaginaries through which Europe pictured itself becoming something else: primary sources spanning five centuries, read alongside the theoretical texts that illuminate them, each for the horizon it opened in its own present, and for what remains of that horizon in ours.

Modalités d'organisation et de suivi

Assessment

Oral presentation and written exam

Disciplines

• Histoire et civilisations: histoire des mondes modernes, histoire du monde contemporain; de l'art; de la musique

Informations complémentaires

Daniel Meyer, daniel.meyer@unistra.fr

Bibliographie

Key Readings

Anderson, Ben. "Emergency Futures: Exception, Urgency, Interval, Hope." The Sociological Review 65, no. 3 (2017): 463–477.

Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (1990): 295–310.

Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande. "Cosmopolitanism: Europe's Way Out of Crisis." European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (2007): 67–85.

Cantó-Milà, Natàlia, and Swen Seebach. "Between Temporalities, Imaginaries and Imagination: A Framework for Analysing Futures." European Journal of Social Theory 27, no. 2 (2024): 298–313.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern." Millennium 46, no. 3 (2018): 259–282.

David, Maxine, Maria Garcia, Toni Haastrup, and Frank Mattheis. "Disrupting and Re-Imagining European Studies: Towards a More Diverse and Inclusive Discipline." Journal of Contemporary European Research 19, no. 2 (2023): 151–162.

Hobart, Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese. "Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times." Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 1–16.

Holtorf, Cornelius, and Annalisa Bolin. "Heritage Futures: A Conversation." Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 14, no. 2 (2022): 252–265.

Lecocq, Sharon, and Stephen Keukeleire. "Critical and Problem-Solving Perspectives on Decentring EU External Action Studies." Journal of Contemporary European Research 19, no. 2 (2023): 164–180.

Lilja, Mona, and Stellan Vinthagen. "Dispersed Resistance: Unpacking the Spectrum and Properties of Glaring and Everyday Resistance." Journal of Political Power 11, no. 2 (2018): 211–229.

Majewska, Ewa Alicja. "The Utopia of 'Solidarity' Between Public Sphere and Counterpublics: Institutions of the Common Revisited." Utopian Studies 29, no. 2 (2018): 229–247.

Nicolaïdis, Kalypso. "European Demoicracy and Its Crisis." Journal of Common Market Studies 51, no. 2 (2013): 351–369.

Rumford, Chris. "Introduction: Citizens and Borderwork in Europe." Space and Polity 12, no. 1 (2008): 1–12.

Soniewicka, Marta. "The Politics of Hope: Utopia as an Exercise in Social Imagination." In Utopian Thinking in Law, Politics, Architecture and Technology, 96–115. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022.

Secondary readings

Alpan, Başak, and Afrim Hoti, eds. Imagining Europe in Times of War and Crises. Cham: Springer, 2025

Anderson, Perry. The New Old World. London: Verso, 2011

Balibar, Étienne. We, the People of Europe? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003

Baüböck, Rainer, ed. Debating European Citizenship. Cham: Springer, 2019

Engelbrekt, Antonina Bakardjieva, and Xavier Groussot, eds. The Future of Europe: Political and Legal Integration Beyond Brexit. Oxford: Hart, 2019

Habermas, Jürgen. The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. Cambridge: Polity, 2013

Hansen, Peo, and Stefan Jonsson. Eurafrica. London: Bloomsbury, 2014

Houde, Anne-Marie, Thomas Laloux, Morgan Le Corre Juratic, Heidi Mercenier, Damien Pennetreau, and Alban Versailles, eds. The Politicization of the European Union. Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 2023

Kaeding, Michael, Johannes Pollak, and Paul Schmidt, eds. Climate Change and the Future of Europe. Cham: Springer, 2023

Kaeding, Michael, Johannes Pollak, and Paul Schmidt, eds. Security, Defence, and the Future of Europe. Cham: Springer, 2026

Kettemann, Matthias C., and Konrad Lachmayer, eds. Pandemocracy in Europe. Oxford: Hart, 2021

Leonard, Mark. The Age of Unpeace. London: Bantam Press, 2021

Lika, Liridon, and Dealan Riga, eds. EU Geopolitical Actorness in a Changing World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

Lorenz, Astrid, and Lisa H. Anders, eds. EU Citizenship Beyond Urban Centres. Cham: Springer, 2023

Neuman, Marek, Ramses A. Wessel, and Thijs de Zee, eds. A Geopolitical Europe in the Making? The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2025

Pagden, Anthony. The Pursuit of Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022

Stojkov, Aleksandar, and Thierry Warin, eds. Western Balkans and the Future of Europe. Cham: Springer, 2025

Tocci, Nathalie. A Green and Global Europe. Cambridge: Polity, 2022

Tsoukalis, Loukas. Europe's Coming of Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2022

Weller, Shane. The Idea of Europe: A Critical History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021

Zwolski, Kamil. Researching European Security Integration. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024

MCC

Les épreuves indiquées respectent et appliquent le règlement de votre formation, disponible dans l'onglet Documents de la description de la formation.

Régime d'évaluation

CT (Contrôle terminal, mêlé de contrôle continu)

Coefficient

1.0

Évaluation initiale / Session principale - Épreuves