Annual Conference 2021

This year’s EuroMemo Group conference will take place from 14 – 24 September 2021 in an Online-Format due to Covid-19. Relevant access details will be available in due course.

This year’s conference will particularly address the Covid-19 pandemic as it has exacerbated the deep economic and social crisis in the world and the EU. While the ‘Next Generation EU’ recovery plan follows a novel and – in part – rather solidaristic and green reaction to the economic fallout of the crisis, the management of the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed severe shortcomings and led to profound frustrations and distress amongst the EU citizenry.The crisis has also shifted political priorities. The European Green Deal and the implementation of the EU Recovery Plan are threatened by the concrete crisis management and especially by the European Semester, which is both undemocratic and dogmatically neoliberal. At the same time, tendencies towards populism and authoritarianism are deepening, not “only” in CEE countries such as Hungary and Poland.

With respect to international affairs, the EU is largely incapable of formulating coherent policy answers to current challenges, in particular with respect to much needed EU and global health policies to fight the pandemic, and in a longer term trajectory, with respect to emerging geopolitical rivalries involving the US and China, but also the EU. Last but not least, the global effort to combat climate change and biodiversity loss demand explicit European policy responses.

The Covid-19 pandemic could thus become a turning point not only for global developments per se, but also with respect to the role of the EU with its gaps between “core and periphery”, old and new member states, EMU members and non EMU members. At the current juncture, it is thus particularly pertinent to ask about the need for fundamentally shifting policy priorities in order to address the grand societal challenges of the present and the future. Instead of a policy approach that focuses on returning ‘back to normal’, the overall trajectory of progressive politics must focus on a solidaristic and green recovery as well as socio-ecological transformation. The annual conference of the EuroMemo Group provides an opportunity to discuss contributions from diverse backgrounds and academic disciplines to this end. It wants especially to invite colleagues, students and civil society activists from CEE countries.