Having rejected the early post-war period’s calls that politics should be subordinated to a higher law protecting the individual from the hazards of (mass)politics, Sweden entered the 1970s without a constitutional rights catalogue and with statutory positivism as the unrivalled judicial method. The 1970s- and 80s, however, marked a turning point in that the idea that law should constrain politics to secure individual rights took hold and was gradually materialised over the next few decades. Approaching human rights and constitutional law as entangled vocabularies, this paper narrates the “breakthrough” of rights in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s by zooming in on the mobilization of the language of human and citizen’s rights by an influential constellation of business associations, affiliated legal professionals and law professors calling for the rule of law, protection of property rights, and an end to the political influence of trade unions and other organisations associated with Social Democracy. The rights activism of the constellation consisted in the production of books, booklets and journal and newspaper articles, but also in the filing of many complaints against the Swedish state to the European Commission/Court of Human Rights. The overall aim of the paper is to consider the role of rights in the transformation of the Swedish state towards neoliberal modes of government that was taking place in parallel in the wake of the fiscal and legitimacy crisis of the Social Democratic social, economic and political model. The aim, however, is also to bring out how the “new” rightsbased welfare state that emerged after the 1980s qualitatively differs from the old one.
Bio
Leila Brännström is a professor of legal theory at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research interests are focused on the intersection of political and legal theory, legal history, and constitutional and human rights law. In her previous work she has among other things examined feminist and anticolonial ambitions in Sweden’s foreign policy from the 1950s onward, the development of legal responses to ethnoracial inequality after WWII in Sweden and in Continental Europe and the effects of transnational constitutional discourses and human rights law on domestic juridical traditions of thought. She has also written several texts on Carl Schmitt’s ideas and its receptions and influences.
Irregular migration across the Mediterranean, along with the public reactions it has provoked, has been one of the most significant factors of social and political destabilization in Europe in recent decades. The emergence and consolidation of irregular maritime routes date back to the early 1990s, when European states, in establishing the Schengen Area, introduced visa requirements for most African and Asian nationals. These restrictions cut off legal migration pathways, leading to a steady increase in clandestine crossings. For over three decades, two competing narratives have shaped how this migration has been understood. The media has consistently framed it as a “crisis”, portraying large-scale maritime arrivals as a threat to Europe’s migration system—hence the widespread use of the term “European Migration Crisis” to describe the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees via dangerous routes. Scholars, often in direct opposition to media discourse, have developed a different framework, emphasizing the structural forces— economic disparity, political instability, and historical legacies—that sustain migration. This paper examines these two narratives through the case of the Central Mediterranean route, focusing on the emblematic example of Lampedusa. By comparing Italian local (La Sicilia, Il Giornale di Sicilia, La Gazzetta del Sud) and national (Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa) newspaper archives and journalistic reportages with scientific publications, it demonstrates that these narratives do not merely describe migration but reflect the priorities, assumptions, and internal logics of the professional domains in which they are produced -journalism and academia-. In doing so, the paper highlights how the academic community has often focused more on sterile criticism of competing narratives than on advancing a broader understanding of irregular Mediterranean migration. The study suggests that scholarly work should reconsider the constructive aspects of journalistic investigation and coverage to foster a deeper comprehension of the phenomenon.
It is often assumed that values are constant points of normative reference that provide reliable orientation in times of insecurity. Thus, it is no wonder that under the impression of the current cascade of crises, some philosophers have already proposed to return to value-universalism, being convinced that this would be necessary to overcome social conflicts and provide a strong normative orientation that is needed in dealing with crises. However, such a diagnosis rises the crucial question what value-universalism we might refer to – or more specific: which values might be suitable candidates of such a universalism.
In my talk, I would like point out a fundamental problem concerning the idea of universalization by referring to the phenomenon of value-attachment and its relation to universalization. Value-attachments may diminish, fail in life, be (re-)vitalized or prove themselves. I will argue that the relation of value-universalization and value-attachment is structurally problematic: On one hand, only abstract values with a certain generality can be universalized. On the other hand, in our attachments, these values have to be articulated (Charles Taylor) and concretized, which seems barely compatible with keeping them universal.
In my discussion, I shall proceed as follows: Firstly, I will give an overview on valueuniversalism, referring also to the difference of concrete and abstract values. Secondly, I will elaborate an account of value-attachments, highlighting their importance for relating values to the human lifeworld. Thirdly, I will take both views together arguing that many values are either too abstract for affective attachments or too concrete for universalization. Finally, I will try do discuss if there might be possibilities to deal with that problem, for instance by universalizing a stance we take toward our value-attachments.
Democracy in the European Union (EU), a crisis revived or a long-running source of contention? Or, perhaps, a series of crises, depending on how we view the history of democracy in the EU and in which contexts we study it. In this paper, I will provide crucial historical framing and insights on a change that was supposed to herald a new age for democracy in the EEC but could instead be seen as something of a crisis: direct elections to the European Parliament. This paper will seek to understand this pivotal change and attempt to enhance democracy from the perspective of sceptics, critics, and opponents. It will engage with the counter-views that challenged this democratic development and seek to understand how, in the context of the UK, further democratic engagement could, in fact, be seen as unwelcome and even, at times, branded undemocratic.
Enhancing a democratic mechanism, in the form representatives to the European Parliament, in a country known for and characterised by its long history of parliamentary democracy, was also a point of contention, disagreement, and emblematic of the democratic crisis in the history of European integration. In exploring the issue of direct elections, the paper will assess competing representative claims in the UK and at the European level and seek to analyse how changes in democratic practices could be moments of crisis. This paper will analyse how ‘Europe’ was viewed, what constituted and underpinned counter-narratives and criticisms of ‘democratic progress’, and, ultimately, it will ask how an endeavour to be more democratic could be seen by some as achieving the opposite effect. At a fundamental level this paper will thus ask: what lessons can be drawn from the history of a now former member when it comes to the crisis of democracy in the EU?
Short Biographical Note
William King is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. He has worked at the German Historical Institute London, Sciences Po, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and he was also a Simone Veil Visiting Fellow at the LMU Munich. William’s research focuses on the history of Britain and Europe, the European Parliament, and European integration.
This article situates the examination of historical analogies within interpretive approaches to the study of international politics and foreign policy. We suggest treating historical analogies in interpretive terms — as instrumentally used metaphorical conceptions of history. Seeing historical analogies in this light underlines their constructive nature, which can be studied interpretively within a broader meaning-based approach to the social sciences. To exemplify this argument, we take the use of the Winter War analogy in the current Finnish-Ukrainian relations as the case study. We believe that Finland’s material assistance to Ukraine in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine since 2022 originates in the Finnish experiences of the Winter War of 1939-1940 that Finland fought against the Soviet Union. The study of this historical analogy helps us to explain why Finland opted for military support for Ukraine and became a strong advocate for Ukraine’s NATO and EU membership.
Keywords: historical analogy, metaphor, foreign policy making, interpretivism, Finland, Ukraine
Lina Klymenko I am a University Researcher at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. My research on international politics is situated at the intersection of International Relations, History, Sociology, Literary Studies, and Linguistics. I am interested in studying the international politics of memory, political language and foreign policy, interpretive research methodology and methods in political science, decolonization of Eastern European Studies and International Relations, as well as teaching and learning politics. I obtained my PhD in Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria, and I hold the Title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in International Relations from Tampere University and the Title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Public Policy from the University of Eastern Finland.
Akseli Ahtiainen In May 2025, I will graduate with a Master of Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki, where I studied Political Science and International Relations. My studies also included three semesters abroad at Humboldt University in Berlin and European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). I recently completed a traineeship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where I gained experience in academic work and research. Prior to this, I interned at the Embassy of Finland in Berlin, where I gained experience on foreign and security policy issues.
This presentation focuses on the recent legal developments of the right to seek asylum in the EU in response to what has been defined as ‘instrumentalization of migration’, a ‘hybrid attack’ or a ‘hybrid threat’ by Belarus in 2021 and Russia in 2023 and directed at the EU Eastern Border. It has been argued that these recent processes of instrumetalization and weaponisation of migration are not new developments but rather an evolution of the phenomenon of securitisation of migration law (Gkliati 2023). In result both the EU law and the laws adopted in Poland or Finland are even further limiting human rights and excluding international protection in certain circumstances.
In this presentation I intend to develop this argument further by juxtaposing the concept of instrumentalization of migration with instrumentalization of migration (refugee) law (Polezhaeva 2004) and show how the former serves as a ‘mobilising metaphor’ (Adam et al 2024) to justify the latter. I will situate these developments within the process of Communautarization of migration law that has started in the 1990s with the transfer of the migration-related areas from the Third to First Pillar of the EU (Kostakopoulou 2000).
I will show in particular how the Communautarization of migration law has been linked with both its instrumentalization and securitisation. This is visible in particular in the expansion of the logic of control from the intergovernmental framework of cooperation to the Community level (Kostakopoulou 2000) coupled with the intention of the Member states to retain as much of the migration control as possible over their own migration policies (Foblet & Vanderheule 2007). Currently this practice is manifested in a shift of the emphasis from international and EU law towards national law, a process where state activities are increasingly grounded in domestic rather than international law (Baranowska 2021).
Bio
Magdalena Kmak is Professor of Public International Law, with a specialization in Migration and Minority Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, Business, and Economics, and Law, Åbo Akademi University.
Magdalena has received her PhD in 2009 from the Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. She holds the title of Docent in law and globalization (University of Helsinki). Her current research focuses on the multifaceted relationship between law and mobility, in particular in the context of global migration and minority regimes. Her research interests encompass mobility, migration and exile studies, public international law, human rights and international and European refugee and migration law. Kmak is a PI and Consortium Director in a project Diversity, Trust and Two-Way Integration (Mobile Futures) funded by the Strategic Research Council established within the Research Council of Finland (2021-2027). She is also co-founder of the Nordic Network on Climate Related Displacement and Mobility.
The European Union’s (EU) migration management measures adopted post-2015, framed within the “migration crisis” narrative, have engendered a creeping crisis in migration management. In this article, I address how and why these measures brought about a creeping crisis and how this affects refugee “access”, understood as a selective inclusion process. I compare the 2015 European Agenda and the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum within a theoretical–analytical framework grounded in the EU’s post-2015 Greek–Turkish external border. These policy instruments represent key turning points in the EU’s evolving approach to migration management and symptomize its transformation into a crisis. To unpack these symptoms, I focus the analysis on particular non-access moments when refugees in “irregular” circumstances are excluded from the EU territory at physical borders (border barriers, border closures, pushbacks), from protection at legal borders (visa, containment, detention, deportation), and from EUropean society at social borders (othering). I argue that the targeted, spatiotemporal expansion of migration management measures within and beyond EU territory through persisting “migration crisis” narratives perpetuates the management crisis. The article seeks to bring a systematic understanding of the EU’s migration management crisis as a continuous bordering process, adapted to certain population movements politicized as crises.
Keywords: migration crisis, creeping crisis, migration management, bordering, European Agenda, New Pact, European Union
Bio
Dr Berfin Nur Osso is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, and a research affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative at the University of London and the Erik Castrén Institute at the University of Helsinki. In her postdoctoral work as part of the ‘REBOUND (Reconceptualizing Boundaries Together Towards Resilient and Just Arctic Futures)’ project, she investigates the socio-economic integration of refugees and migrants in the context of the Finnish Arctic’s ‘green’ transition. Her current research involves critical border and migration studies, EU asylum law and policy, human rights and justice theories, and visual research methods.
Osso has a background in law, international relations, political science, and visual arts. She holds a Doctor of Laws (with distinction) from the University of Helsinki (2025). She obtained a Master of Social Sciences degree in International Relations and Political Science from Tampere University (Finland, 2019) and a Bachelor of Laws degree with a minor degree in International Relations from Koç University (Istanbul, Türkiye, 2017). Osso visited the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research at Radboud University (2023) and the Centre of Law and Society at Cardiff University (online, 2022). She also worked as a project researcher at the University of Eastern Finland (2021–2022), and as a research assistant at Migration Research Center (MiReKoc) at Koç University (2017) and the Institute of International Relations Prague (2016).
Osso’s articles appeared in several international journals, including the International Journal of Refugee Law, Geopolitics, and Forced Migration Review. She is also enthusiastic as a political cartoonist about reflecting on contemporary phenomena in her editorial cartoons.
The paper investigates in which context and for what purposes have legal scholars invoked the term constitutional identity in scholarship on the EU legal order between 1990 till 2021. Two analytical tools – David Scoots ‘problem space’ and David Kennedys ‘field of struggle’ were used for the investigation. The ‘problem space’ was used to explore the chronological development in the use of the term and to investigate what changes occur in the topics, issues, and questions in which constitutional identity was used over time. The use of the ‘problem space’ allows to sketch out a periodization of the use of the constitutional identity term. The analysis with the ‘field of struggle’ then explores the differences in opinions within the identified topics or questions as well as it allows to present the relationships within the spectrum of those opinions among scholars.
This presentation will sketch out the differences between the periods and highlight the struggles present at the core of each period. Furthermore, it will give insight into which narrative(s) the term constitutional identity has aided to over the last thirty years in the EU. The periods correspond to the following questions:
1) Can the EU have a constitution although there are no European people? (1990 to 2004)
2) How does the appropriate legal design of the EU look, and how does constitutional identity play into that design? (2005 to 2009)
3) Where is the line between the EUs and the Member States' competencies/sovereignty? (2009 to present)
4) Meta discussion on what constitutional identity is (2017 to present)
(Note: This paper is derived from a chapter within the author's ongoing PhD thesis project.)
While the Koselleckian approaches have been applied to the question of Europe, scholars have overlooked how Koselleck himself conceptualized Europe. Was ‘Europe’ a purely scientific concept or did it reflect a particular political worldview and philosophy of history? Are there significant shifts of meaning? Koselleck has an implicit, philosophical, narrative, social-historical, and indirectly political concept of Europe, I argue, focusing on his early work (c. 1959–1969) with some important digressions to his later essays on 1848 as a pan-European event. Particularly the book Das Zeitalter der europäischen Revolution has been all but neglected although it crucially mediated between Koselleck’s early and late interpretations of 1848. My paper addresses the narrative vehicles Koselleck employed to tell his story of European modernity, such as the metaphorics of panEuropean “fermentation” and a broken “dam” against the “river” of the revolution, partly derived from Herder and Metternich. Argumentatively, he operated in a longer tradition of philosophical historiography, With Otto Brunner, Koselleck emphasized the transition from an “old Europe” into modernity; with Carl Schmitt, he traced the Cold War crisis into intra-European ideological tensions and the decay of the ius publicum europaeum; with Hans Freyer, Koselleck framed world history as European history writ large. Koselleck built a pan-European, and eventually global, narrative of representative anecdotes – a narrative in which 18th and 19th -century historical developments resonate with then-contemporary political experiences. This implicit, philosophical, narrative, social-historical, and indirectly political notion of Europe rests on a wider historical story, emerges as its by-product, and can only be comprehended in this context. The notion of Europe crucially mediates between the national, transnational, and global levels of Koselleck’s arguments, and this is its central argumentative function. Koselleck’s notion of Europe is therefore a condensation of his philosophical, social and political theorizing, loaded with tacit theoretical implications.
Bio
Timo Pankakoski is a Collegium Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland, where he works on a project on political metaphors and develops better methods for reading them. After his doctorate (Helsinki, 2013), he has obtained the Title of Docent (Associate Professor) in Political Science in Helsinki, worked three times as a University Lecturer of Political Science or European Studies, and held visiting positions in Princeton University and Queen Mary University of London. Pankakoski works mostly on political theory, history of political thought, German intellectual history, radical conservatism, political metaphors, conceptual history, and the methodology of intellectual history. His latest publications include “Elasticity, Militancy, and Infection: Metaphorical Argumentation in the Trial Against the German Communist Party, 1954–56” (History of European Ideas, 2024), “Another Language: The Relationship Between War and Politics in Ernst Jünger’s Early Political Writings” (New German Critique, 2024), and “From Lifeless Numbers to the Vital Nerve of Democracy: Dolf Sternberger’s Metaphorical Argumentation Against Proportional Voting” (Modern Intellectual History, 2023). His other work has appeared in Political Theory, The Journal of the History of Ideas, History and Theory, Contributions to the History of Concepts, History of European Ideas, Global Intellectual History, Redescriptions, and elsewhere.
If one was to look for a single word to describe the historical experiences of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), crisis comes immediately to mind. Be that the fall of great empires of the region following World War I (WWI), the tragedy of World War II (WWII), the Iron Curtain separating CEE from the rest of the world, the fall of communism, the more recent illiberal ‘reckoning’ or the Russo-Ukrainian war, the region’s history is characterised by unpredictibility. Importantly, these moments of ground-breaking change affect not only the political sphere but also the national imaginaries. Law plays an important role in managing these modifications, in particular those most visible, relating to public spaces and cultural heritage. The purpose of this paper is to look holistically at the changes that took place in the public sphere in the region since the end of WWI, with a particular focus on the intersection of law, politics and social changes. In the first, theoretical part of the paper, the author explains the relationship between collective memory and public spaces, linking these concepts with the understanding of the field, violence, habitus, and crisis proposed by Bourdieu. The second part of the paper introduces the major moments of change in the recent CEE history from the perspective of reimagination of public spaces, illustrating them on selected case studies: post-WWI fall of the empires and the destruction of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw, the WWII atrocities and the erasure of shtetl culture, the times of communism and the construction of the People’s Palace in Bucharest, the post-1989 decommunisation and the (not always) meticulous removal of the communist monuments from Estonia, the arrival of illiberalism and the reimagining of museums in Hungary, and, ultiamtely, the Russo-Ukrainian war and the ensuing derussification of Ukraine.
Keywords: collective memory, cityscapes, cultural heritage, Bourdieu, Central and Eastern Europe, Poland, shtetl, Romania, Estonia, Hungary, Ukraine
European integration has long relied on a selective historical narrative—one that emphasizes unity while marginalizing histories of violence, displacement, and inequality. Like all political projects, the idea of Europe has required a form of collective forgetting: certain memories, life stories, and experiences have been repressed in order to sustain a coherent and hopeful vision of the future. Yet, these silenced memories often resurface in new forms, complicating dominant explanatory models of European unity.
This presentation explores how the legacy of suppressed histories continues to shape contemporary European imaginaries through an ethnographic study of Sudeten German families expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II. In East Germany, their experiences were quickly silenced in favor of a homogenized socialist identity. In West Germany, their status as refugees was initially acknowledged, but demands for recognition—and even the memory of their lost homeland—were increasingly marginalized, especially after 1968.
Focusing on the second and third generations, this research examines how familial silence and intergenerational memory shape their understanding of Europe as a continent marked by flight, displacement, and contested belonging. The study raises the question of whether this inherited silence helps to explain why minority rights remain a persistent stumbling block for European politics today.
By foregrounding forgotten and repressed narratives, this talk engages critically with the crisis of memory at the heart of the European project—and the implications such crises hold for envisioning a more inclusive future.
Amid increasingly restrictive migration control in the Global North, deportation and other forms of forced removal of noncitizens have become a mass-scale phenomenon. In a development described as a “deportation turn” (Gibney 2008), governments have sought to expand their infrastructural and legal capacity to remove unwanted non-citizens. Despite its prominence, deportation forms a highly non-transparent area of state power surrounded by historical blind spots. There is consequently limited understanding of why and how it has become so central in current migration politics. In this presentation, I will look at the case of the Nordic countries to critically assesses the methodological presentism concerning deportation, and the consequent short-term, single-cause explanations, such as seeing deportations as a response to 9/11, or the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Instead, I argue that deportation has been a constitutive part in the socially and racially selective formation of modern nation/welfare states; and that its expanding use reflects an ongoing redrawing of social, racial, and symbolic boundaries in “post-universal” welfare states (Tervonen 2022).
References:
Gibney, M.J. (2008, 142) Asylum and the Expansion of Deportation in the United Kingdom. Government and Opposition, 43(2), 146–167; Tervonen, M. (2022) ‘Borders of welfare: Mobility control and the Nordic welfare states’, in Kettunen, P. (ed.), Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State. Edward Elgar, 150-165
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