Messy Europe

Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work “crisis talk” does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.

Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries: Redefining Progressiveness, Coloniality and Transition Efforts is a timely contribution to the project of theorizing "Europe" through decolonial perspectives on the Left, as the European and global crisis has prompted new reflections on what it means to sit still at the European "peripheries". The book explores how the joint scholarship efforts of postcolonial and postsocialist scholars might come up with better-grounded and more detailed theoretical and methodological insights into the process of globalization, and subsequent peripheralization, if framed under a progressive and leftist perspective. The authors, many from the South-East Europe region, use a variety of analytical lenses to demonstrate how the nexus of postcolonial, postsocialist area studies and progressive developmental political thought could inspire changes in the future which are in dissonance with neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism. As the side effects of global capitalism continue to accelerate, scholars and activists in the postsocialist periphery are increasingly turning to the concept of decoloniality in the hope it might offer more options on how to begin to build up their framework. This book offers numerous examples of how decolonial theory can be applied to activist work in the fight against austerity and neo-liberalization, as well as examples of how decolonial critique can be mobilized to contest processes of Europeanization and Euro-Atlantic integration. This book will intrigue students and scholars of critical social scholarship in general, postsocialism, postcolonialism, critiques of right populism and the rise of white nationalism in Europe, as well as those studying the regions of South-Eastern Europe and Eurasia more generally. It will also interest activists, organizers, decision-makers, policy analysts, and leftists, both in the region and internationally.

This book rethinks meritocracy as a form of coloniality, namely, a social imaginary that reproduces narratives of ethnic and racial difference between European centres and peripheries, and between Europe and its others. Drawing on interviews with working and middle class, white and Black Italians who moved to Britain after the 2008 economic crisis, the book explores the narratives of Northern meritocracy and Southern backwardness that inform migrants' motivations for moving abroad, and how these narratives are experienced within classed, racialised and gendered migrations. Connecting decolonial theory with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this book provides innovative insights into the relationships between meritocracy, coloniality and European whiteness, and into the social stratification of EU migrations.

This volume crucially provides an analytical and comparative approach, investigating the meaning and uses of the concept of exceptionalism, while demonstrating the ways in which it manifests itself in different historical and geographical settings. Exceptionalism offers comparative case studies from different parts of the world, showcasing the way in which exceptionalism has come to occupy an important narrative position in relation to different nation-states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, various European nations and countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. An introduction to and overview of a term that has come to define the past and present identity of many nations, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and politics.

Europe is often described as "flooded" by migrants or by Muslim "others," with Western African men especially portrayed as a security risk. At the same time the intensified mobility of privileged people in the Global North is celebrated as creating an increasingly cosmopolitan world. This book looks critically at racialization of mobility in Europe, anchoring the discussion in the aspiration of precarious migrants from Niger in Belgium and Italy. The book contextualizes their experiences within the ongoing securitization of mobility in their home country and the persistent denial of racism and colonialism that seeks to portray the innocence of Europe.

Our lives increasingly take place in ever more complex and interconnected networks that blur the boundaries we have traditionally used to define our social and political spaces. Accordingly, the policy problems that governments are called upon to deal with have become less clear-cut and far messier. This is particularly the case with climate change, environmental policy, transport, health and ageing - all areas in which the tried-and-tested linear policy solutions are increasingly inadequate or failing. What makes messy policy problems particularly uncomfortable for policy makers is that science and scientific knowledge have themselves become sources of uncertainty and ambiguity. Indeed what is to count as a 'rational solution' is itself now the subject of considerable debate and controversy. This book focuses on the intractable conflict that characterises policy debate about messy issues. The author first develops a framework for analysing these conflicts and then applies the conceptual framework to four very different policy issues: the environment - focussing on climate change - as well as transport, ageing and health. Using evidence from Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific, the book compares how policy actors construct contending narratives in order to make sense of, and deal with, messy challenges. In the final section the author discusses the implications of the analysis for collective learning and adaptation processes. The aim is to contribute to a more refined understanding of policy-making in the face of uncertainty and, most importantly, to provide practical methods for critical reflection on policy and to point to sustainable adaptation pathways and learning mechanisms for policy formulation.

After moving for ten plus years towards an ever closer union, the European Union and its citizens now face the choice whether to establish a full-fledged common polity. This decision requires a Europe-wide debate that includes the candidate states. European citizens must discuss what (if any) common values, principles and basic policies they share. A European identity involves the Union's institutions becoming rooted in the "soul" of the citizens, whatever its relationship might be to the existing national and local identities. Only then will the EU possess democratic legitimacy and support. These two volumes are written by authors with a political and intellectual interest in the European process. They discuss the EU's unprecedented character as a peacefull and voluntary union of peoples, its understandable obstacles encountered along the way to further integration, and the Union's less acceptable shortcomings. The first volume is written for the general reader. It examines the essential components of a European political identity in relation to democracy, citizenship, social justice, war and peace, freedom and borders. It also explores the history of this identity. The second volume is a collection of scientific essays. These provide in-depth analysis of fundamental aspects of European cultural identity such as religion, art and economic culture, myth and civil society. The two volumes can be read independently. However, we hope readers of either one will feel stimulated to reach for the other.