Website:https://europeindiscourse.eu/
Contact Person - Androniki Koumadoraki
Event inquiry /Organizer email address - europeindiscourse@hauniv.edu
Organized by: Hellenic American University
Topic Covered: Discourse, Economics, Higher Education, Identity, European Studies, Politics
Tracing Identity through Values, History, and Borders foregrounds values as an ever-present dimension of European identity. If, within Europe, governing also takes place by mobilizing values then there should be consensus that to understand European identity becomes fundamental to trace those core values it draws on. At the same time, the political mobilization of values brought about tensions around what Europeanness means and how differing values had a place in the European sphere. Questions that arise include: does Europe, exert normative power, does it resort to values as functional tools for policy-making transparency or does it decide to promote political paradigms governance? Which values have been historically mobilized to unite Europeans and shape how others perceive Europe Europeanization? How current are the values of the Treaty of Lisbon? Can Europe rely only on soft power to increase its relevance?   Values, however, cannot be stripped from history as they are clearly expressed in social and historical change and transformed through such change. Values, therefore, form the backdrop against which a call to legitimization of European action is played out.   The topic of borders, invites us to consider European identity spatially. This has often been framed in terms of state territorialities but there have been calls for a renewed approach with a spatial demarcation of Europe that is less “hard”. While the European Union, as an institutional space of policymaking, is associated with borders, Europeanness, does not necessarily imply a spatial mark. It is not identified with a specific location but always draws more on a collective archive from a shared values-based past. In the post-Lisbon treaty era, therefore, Europe and the European Union may need to balance the need for “hard” borders with the recognition that a values-based European Union may require “soft” b-ordering.   These three closely intersecting dimensions are informing current debates about European identity and raise important questions: Can the often-powerful ties between Euroscepticism and populism derail the project of European integration? How transformative has Brexit been for the European Union? Does the European Union exert a normative values-based legitimization governing by values? If so, what are the linguistic and, therefore, communicative tokens of this? What are the diverse values that each nation state contributes to the European Union and how are these values discursively reflected? How aligned are the so-called imagined and experienced Europe particularly after Brexit?