By Jonathan Larson, Associate Director of the EU Center
September 2021
Transatlantic relations has typically entailed the study of differences between two continents, and the search for common ground between them. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic found the two sides of the Atlantic tragically alike in their relative lack of preparedness, despite decades of warnings, for a public health crisis unlike any other in living memory. Institutions, while never as homogeneous and static as we often treat them, have been subjected on both sides of the Atlantic to tremendous stresses in competence, governance, and public trust. One of the biggest questions of the past two years has been what are the appropriate or situationally necessary roles of the larger scale structures of governance (be it the U.S. federal government or the European Union) versus the smaller scale (states or countries)? Yet identities (themselves never stable in “calm” times) are also under pressures of volcanic magnitude. The pandemic has only brought to a boil the simmering tensions between a broad and loose constellation of “liberal” forces and a perhaps more focused set of illiberal populist agitators who have proven themselves very capable of at least momentarily capturing the hearts and minds of many in their polities. We can only hope that among the changes going forward, conversations about race will never be the same, even if the path lies through ongoing ugly encounters over difference and rights with racism’s now more public defenders.
Since August 2018 the EUC has been coordinating a large, multi-faceted project of research, teaching, and public education on the above themes as a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, a multi-year grant awarded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission. Re-Imagining Identities and Institutions for a Stronger Europe (RIISE) has placed into conversation two complementary agendas to advance transatlantic dialogue on current manifestation of populism. The EUC has structured activities within the RIISE project to speak to populism as a project arising from tensions between the dynamic evolution of institutions and identities. Further details about the conceptualization of the project have been published elsewhere (see e.g. http://eucenterillinois.blogspot.com/2018/08/european-union-awards-prestigious.html). This post offers us the chance to take stock of what we learned through the first two years of the project, through August 2020. Two others in a three-part series will look at the third year and then arc of the project in its entirety.
Institutions under Pressure
The second year of the RIISE project (2019-20) very keenly highlighted the pressures facing the institutions of European unification. Fall 2019 began with all eyes on the UK, and ears trying to make sense of the conflicting messages coming out of that country’s debates about leaving the European Union. EUC staff and MAEUS graduate students conducted video interviews with two important figures in the Brexit debate: the Baroness Ruth Deech (an advocate for departing the EU) and Dr. Catherine Barnard, a law professor at Cambridge working with an NGO to provide objectives sources of information on Brexit. For Baronness Deech, we heard how she decided to offer her voice in support of Brexit at the time of the Eastern enlargements that began in 2004. For Deech, the pressures facing the values of the EU as an institution were inseparable from the identities into which the UK had been forced into new forms of contact. Long a haven for intellectuals and refugees from Europe’s “east” (Deech’s family among them), the UK had seemed to lose something of its ability to shape the destiny of its own identity.
The eventual departure of the UK from the European Union in January 2020 certainly had a somber feel among those who champion European integration. Yet it was hardly lost on observers that the UK’s departure did not inspire similar actions. A November talk by political scientist Gemma Sala from Grinnell College more on the phenomenon of the political leadership of some nationalities looking to declare sovereignty from their host countries as an electoral stunt, and only if it seemed that the future would hold an invitation of continued life within the EU. The keynote of February’s annual EU Day, by German Consul General Wolfgang Mössinger, emphasized political affinities that he observed during his service in Donetsk, Ukraine, between a current generation of Ukrainians and the democratic values that the EU seeks to project into its border regions. Populism, as seen from these views, cannot be studied without accounting for the real possibility of political manipulation and misinformation. A March symposium on the crisis of liberal democracy highlighted all too clearly the tangled ways in which populist elites exploit the resources of EU institutions while using broadsides against the influence of “Brussels” on identities to bend national institutions such as the courts to their will.
Identifies in Contact
As the above events with a focus on institutions could not escape questions of populism, nor could they steer clear of discussions of identities. One of the major stresses on European identities posing concomitant challenges to institutions has been the surge of immigration into Europe over the past decade, particularly from collapsed states of the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The EUC co-sponsored an important lecture by Nihad Bunar on migration and the Swedish education system, a visit that included another video interview with questions developed by our MAEUS graduate students. The EUC was delighted to co-sponsor a conference organized by German visiting scholar Christoph Schwarz on migration and political socialization, an event that featured theoretical reflection along with careful social research on communities and states including several around the Mediterranean.
It was clear from particularly the second event that European institutions, such as the EU or the European Court of Human Rights (as Jessica Greenberg’s talk made clear) do deserve to be put under a critically reflexive spotlight, particularly in regard to how they can contribute to the violation of international norms while ostensibly acting to protect certain rights. The EUC was headed from winter into spring eager to foster conversations about institutions, identities, rights, and international law through speakers hosted by political scientists with funds from our Jean Monnet grant as well as the keynote speaker of our annual EU Studies Regional Conference, scheduled for April. Like everyone, we did not expect a pandemic.
The Project and the Pandemic
While the EU Center, like other area centers, cancelled its Spring 2020 events and the opportunities for discussion that they represented, its staff remained open to questions of how this dramatic new global development might shift entirely the landscape of our inquiry. We were struck early on by how U.S. media focused on the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. The pan-European challenge of COVID-19 played a tremendous role in initial U.S. public discourse about the threat from the virus, with attention fixated on the other side of the Atlantic as in other moments of the past century such as World War II and the migration crisis. Yet Europe also offered so many varied scenes of how societies might confront the reality of a virus that they did not expect. EUC Academic Coordinator Lucas Henry organized a blog series, “COVID-19 in Europe” that balanced updates on statistics with perspectives from members of the University of Illinois community, particularly students.
The variation in national stories about the battle with the virus told us just as much about puzzles of institutional responses as it did what these responses and those of real people might tell us about identities. This dramatic transnational social, economic, and of course political crisis also reminded everyone at the EUC how research and analysis of social and political phenomena, such as the questions of identities and institutions at the heart of our RIISE project, need to grapple with questions of historical legacies, cycles, and ruptures. Our April 2020 series of lectures in response to the pandemic, “Contagion and Quarantine in Historic Perspective: From the European Middle Ages to the Present” was our first step in reconciling our longer-term intellectual engagements, research, and teaching with a global situation that called for a historical sensibility to avoid rash conclusions about what might be changing before our eyes (and what might be changing outside of our vision). The success of these lectures in terms of attendance and resonance with the university community showed the importance of Europe in a U.S. historical imagination that has been the foundation of a transatlantic relationship. They also offered important comparative perspectives on what an earlier pandemic changed (and what it did not) about social, political, and economic life across Europe.
As we entered Year 3 of the RIISE project, we recognized that the pandemic was disrupting the processes of the past decade that had formed the subject of our inquiry. However, it was also critical that we balance a widespread popular view that “everything has changed” with a longer and measured historical perspective. Several of our existing participating faculty exchanged summer research travel for research assistants in Urbana-Champaign. Our speaker series, events, and publication adapted further to new circumstances. The staff of the EU Center themselves felt that they could not proceed with the project in this disrupted landscape without the benefit of historical perspectives. We therefore welcomed the participation of a few new faculty under a sub-project of “Uniting Europe: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Production and the Circulation of Identities.” Two particular faculty projects in the humanities, from Carol Symes and Andrea Stevens, helped us utilize a lens recognizable to a pre-pandemic Europe of enhanced mobility-- “circulation”--while drawing out other important dimensions to the project latent in particular in the work on identities.
After the Illusion?
While the pandemic drove us to engage with earlier histories, discussions with EUC students also pointed the way there. Students in the Spring 2020 offering of EURO 500: Dialogue on Europe read book-length essays by Tony Judt (A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe) and Ivan Krastev (After Europe) that both made strong cases for the importance of history in European studies of institutions and identities. The two authors offered somewhat similar baleful reads of the roots of tensions between regions of countries that eventually joined the EU from East Central Europe and the Balkans after the collapse of Communist rule, and the prospects for future institutional cooperation on a continental scale. Judt’s 1996 essay eerily captured the challenges of a more united Europe that have become apparent since the rounds of enlargement that began in 2004. Krastev’s, written in 2017 on the heels of migration crisis, is more sympathetic to Eastern resentments of the process of enlargement and ongoing inequities.
The European Union of August 2020 had become one from which certain illusions, particularly the teleological, were stripped. But perhaps what the first two years of the RIISE project showed us about European unity does not warrant Judt’s label of “a grand illusion,” nor does it mean that we are approaching the point when we might speak of a decisive threat. Krastev offers,
It’s less important that European leaders understand why the Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918 than why it did not disintegrate earlier, in 1848, 1867, or on any number of other occasions. Rather than seeking to ensure the EU’s survival by increasing its legitimacy, perhaps demonstrating its capacity to survive can become a major source of its future legitimacy (111).
As we proceeded further into the third decade of the new millennium and into third and final year of the Jean Monnet RIISE project, we welcomed new perspectives that might help us establish the touchstones for analysis of the European Union and European identities in a post-pandemic world.
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