Veranstaltungen
The Federal Union: Futures and Pasts of a Shared European Heritage 1515-2025
16 - 17 September 2024Europe is in crisis. Perhaps the European Union has even entered, as many analysts like to put it, an era of ‘polycrisis’. One of our most fundamental European debates concerns the future direction of the Union, especially in terms of its democracy, its civic cultures and its geopolitics. What should the make-up of the Union be in terms of democratic institutions? What should be its foundation in terms of citizenship and civic cultures? How should citizens and policy makers address the division and workings of sovereign powers in the Union? How should the Union act in the world of geopolitics? In short, what kind Federal Union should Europe be?
The project is co-organised with the political advisor, essayist and historian Joshua Livestro, whose study A More Perfect Union: Federal Union in Political Thought and Practice, 1500-1951 has just been published as paperback by Amsterdam University Press.
See programme here
Geneva, the Swiss Confederation, and the North: Eighteenth-Century Exchanges
International Workshop organised by Jonas Gerlings, Brian Kjær Olesen, and Martin van Gelderen8 May 2024
More than a century ago in 1910 Louis Bobé noted that “Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a rich intellectual interaction between Copenhagen and Geneva.” While Bobé restricts his assertion to Copenhagen recent studies have unearthed wider connections between Geneva and the Nordic literary public (Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland). Not only did Nordic writers appropriate the ideas of the Republic of Geneva, Swiss writers also displayed an influential interest in the Nordic states. The aim of this workshop is to explore these connections further through the presentation of a series of papers.
See programme here