Final Report Summary - ERERE (Between Restoration and Revolution, National Constitutions and Global Law: an Alternative View on the European Century 1815-1914)
The project was established with the goal of providing an alternative view on the century that began in Vienna in 1815 with a spectacular peace under the motto of ‘never again’ and ended with World War I. From the outset, our assumption was that the century was traversed by themes and tensions that in one way or another continue to dominate ideas about European peace and progress today. By highlighting these, the project has enabled a more realistic historical understanding of the difficulties of the present moment.
The conventional narrative of Europe’s past has depicted the nineteenth century as a conveyor of enlightenment values to today’s Europe, a teleological view emphasizing a slow but straight and steady development from a feudal corporatist to a capitalist order, from autocratic to democratic rule and from poverty to welfare, from warfare to peace. The project has managed to destabilize this grand narrative from a number of perspectives and has put in its place a view of Europe’s past, present and future that is much more discontinuous, open-ended and conflicting than the old one. Above all, we have been able to stress the recurring emergence of authoritarianism as Europe’s legacy to history and the non-European world.
The project has gone beyond Europe and seen Europe’s past and present in its global context. Europe has been studied through the inter-dynamics between from within and from without. This approach is new and innovative not only through its integrating of Europe in its global context, but also in the interaction between domestic social and economic dynamics and external foreign relations.
The project has extended its focus on the nineteenth century both to the eighteenth pre-revolutionary enlightenment society and to the various forms of violence in the twentieth century. The project has mapped and investigated the faces and phases of nationalism and democracy. The project has discerned the bicentenary sequence of postwar-prewar-war-postwar-prewar-war-postwar ending with the question whether the 1945 postwar is about to shift to prewar. Postwar meant concerted attempts to design a European unification, prewar meant the erosion and war the collapse of these attempts with nationalism in a key role. The some ten monographs and collected volumes of the project highlight the entanglements between war and peace, welfare and warfare, property and poverty, colonialism and international law.
The new perspective developed by the project highlights the tensions and entanglements between a) geopolitical power and the attempts to regulate it through international law; b) economic integration and social disintegration, property and poverty; c) welfare and warfare; d) authoritarianism and democracy, and e) designs of national community and international/European cooperation and government, and of civic, social and ethnic forms of nationalism.
These tensions have only been vaguely visible in conventional narratives on Europe developed since the differentiation of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century where each professional craft in disciplines such as law, history, sociology, economics and political sciences has focused on its own specific dimension. Sociology has analyzed social disintegration, and economists have investigated economic integration. International lawyers have investigated the teleology of institutional development, neglecting the deep entaglement of the law’s promise with contested political agendas. International relations studies have, again emphasized geopolitical power relationships with a reductionist view on normative and ideological pursuits. The project has problematized and critically confronted all of these disciplinary separations in a manner that has also enabled it to make problematic the predominant narratives in each individual discipline.
More about the project under www.helsinki.fi/erere.
The conventional narrative of Europe’s past has depicted the nineteenth century as a conveyor of enlightenment values to today’s Europe, a teleological view emphasizing a slow but straight and steady development from a feudal corporatist to a capitalist order, from autocratic to democratic rule and from poverty to welfare, from warfare to peace. The project has managed to destabilize this grand narrative from a number of perspectives and has put in its place a view of Europe’s past, present and future that is much more discontinuous, open-ended and conflicting than the old one. Above all, we have been able to stress the recurring emergence of authoritarianism as Europe’s legacy to history and the non-European world.
The project has gone beyond Europe and seen Europe’s past and present in its global context. Europe has been studied through the inter-dynamics between from within and from without. This approach is new and innovative not only through its integrating of Europe in its global context, but also in the interaction between domestic social and economic dynamics and external foreign relations.
The project has extended its focus on the nineteenth century both to the eighteenth pre-revolutionary enlightenment society and to the various forms of violence in the twentieth century. The project has mapped and investigated the faces and phases of nationalism and democracy. The project has discerned the bicentenary sequence of postwar-prewar-war-postwar-prewar-war-postwar ending with the question whether the 1945 postwar is about to shift to prewar. Postwar meant concerted attempts to design a European unification, prewar meant the erosion and war the collapse of these attempts with nationalism in a key role. The some ten monographs and collected volumes of the project highlight the entanglements between war and peace, welfare and warfare, property and poverty, colonialism and international law.
The new perspective developed by the project highlights the tensions and entanglements between a) geopolitical power and the attempts to regulate it through international law; b) economic integration and social disintegration, property and poverty; c) welfare and warfare; d) authoritarianism and democracy, and e) designs of national community and international/European cooperation and government, and of civic, social and ethnic forms of nationalism.
These tensions have only been vaguely visible in conventional narratives on Europe developed since the differentiation of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century where each professional craft in disciplines such as law, history, sociology, economics and political sciences has focused on its own specific dimension. Sociology has analyzed social disintegration, and economists have investigated economic integration. International lawyers have investigated the teleology of institutional development, neglecting the deep entaglement of the law’s promise with contested political agendas. International relations studies have, again emphasized geopolitical power relationships with a reductionist view on normative and ideological pursuits. The project has problematized and critically confronted all of these disciplinary separations in a manner that has also enabled it to make problematic the predominant narratives in each individual discipline.
More about the project under www.helsinki.fi/erere.