Crises Redux: Europe in a Global Context
EuroStorie Annual Conference 2025
October 1-3, 2025
Keynote: Think Corner (Yliopistonkatu 4)
Conference sessions: University of Helsinki Main Building (Fabianinkatu 33) , Small Hall (F4050)
Conference Overview
Europe is in crisis. Global challenges—ranging from climate change to the erosion of the rules-based international order, as starkly reflected in the human suffering in Ukraine and Palestine—are deeply intertwined with internal challenges within the continent. Populist movements, which are gaining momentum across Europe, oppose immigration and question the foundational justifications of Europe's political institutions and values. These trends can no longer be dismissed as fleeting; instead, Europe must reassess and rethink the justifications on which the continent's political constitution and self-understanding rests.
But what is actually new in this crisis and what part of the current crisis can be seen as a repetition? Europe has historically been in a near-constant state of crisis. What specific historical developments have led to this moment, and does our understanding of the situation reflect reality or the perception of others?
The Crises Redux conference will be organized by the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStorie) funded by the Research Council of Finland. The conference will focus on the same themes that EuroStorie has been working on for the last six years: a critical analysis of the narratives that serve as the building blocks of Europe and a reassessment of the idea of Europe in relation to migration and global history.
The Crises Redux conference will focus on the European narratives and explanatory models used to understand crises, exploring how these frameworks draw on the past and envision possible futures to illuminate the reality of the problems facing contemporary Europe and the means to solve them.
We will explore how Europe’s role in the great lines of the global political economy and in the redistribution of wealth after the Second World War has been explained and how this corresponds to reality. We will examine the process of European integration as a phenomenon that has shaped the continent's development over the last decades, but which now has to rethink its foundational structures and principles; Who does “Europe” represent, and against whom is it defining itself? Finally, the conference will reflect on the place of the European welfare state in a rapidly changing world. What visions of the past and aspirations for the future underpin this model? How do Europe’s collective experiences and its worldviews function within a shifting global order?
Programme
Read all conference abstracts on the conference page
WEDNESDAY 1.10.
Think Corner (Tiedekulma)
17.30-19.00: Keynote 1: Jessica Whyte - Economic Coercion and the Crises of the (Neo) Liberal International Order
THURSDAY 2.10.
Main Building, Small Hall
9.30-9.45: Arrival and registration (coffee/tea)
9.45-10.00: Opening and welcome
10.00-11.00: Keynote 2: Anika Seemann - Law after the ‘Zero Hour’: The Temporalities of Legal Thought in early Postwar Europe
11.00-12.00: Panel 1: Silence and Exclusion in European imagined communities
Miika Tervonen: Deportation, “crisis” and the post-universal welfare state
Reetta Toivanen: History of United Europe: To Remember or to Forget?
12.00-13.30: Lunch Break
13.30-15.00: Panel 2: Shifting temporalities of Crisis in Europe
William King: A crisis of democracy? Counter-narratives and scepticism of direct elections in the UK, 1975-79
Lina Klymenko & Akseli Ahtiainen: Thinking About Historical Analogies Interpretively: What Role Does the Winter War Analogy Play in Finland’s Support for Ukraine?
Mirosław Michał Sadowski: Weaving Narratives of Crises through Law: Lessons and Warnings from Central and Eastern Europe
15.00-15.20: Coffee Break
15.20-17.00: Panel 3: ‘Rights’, ‘Values’ and ‘Europe’ in European History
Leila Brännström: The breakthrough of rights and the battle for the Swedish state in the 1970s and 1980s
Moritz von Kalckreuth: Shall we Simply Return to Value-Universalism? Skeptical Remarks concerning Universalization and Value-Attachments
Timo Pankakoski: Koselleck’s Europe
FRIDAY 3.10.
Main Building, Small Hall
9.30-10.00: Arrival (coffee/tea)
10.00-11.00: Keynote 3: Kiran Klaus Patel - Universalism and After: Narratives and Dynamics of European Integration since the 1980s
11.00-12.00: Panel 4: The Europe of the European Union
Agnė Oseckytė: Once Upon a Legal Order: Constitutional Identity in EU Legal Scholarship
Berfin Nur Osso: A Creeping Crisis of Migration Management? Institutional Responses and Implications for “Access” at the EU’s Physical, Legal, and Social Borders
12.00-13.30: Lunch Break
13.30-15.00: Panel 5: Borders and Movement in Europe
Floris van Doorn: A Redux of What? Some Reflections on Four Years at the EuroStorie Project
Giuliano Fleri: Crisis or Structure? Competing Narratives of Irregular Migration to Lampedusa (1990–Present)
Magdalena Kmak: EU Eastern Border and Europeanisation of the Right to Seek Asylum
We warmly welcome everyone with an interest in the conference subject and/or specific presentations or speakers!
See the conference page for presentation abstracts, speaker bios and more.