There is a lack of a more realistic history that rejects teleological understandings of Europe as a self-propelling project on a steady march towards a predetermined goal. A lack of a history that emphasises the fragility of European peace and progress, so evident today, This project was initiated to respond to this experienced lack.
Here are listed the seminars and workshops from the autumn of 2007 to the end of 2008 at the Helsinki University that prepared the two projects Europe 1815-1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World and Conceptual History and Global Translations. The seminars and the projects dealt with fact-finding missions into the past with normative questions about the future in the back of the mind, questions about a better world, whatever that means. Here is also the last conclusing seminar of the Europe 1815-1914 project in 2013.
(Sweden's History 1830-1920). Stockholm: Norstedts 2012. 712 pp Abstract The focus of the book is on the emergence of the modern mass society under intensestruggles about how to shape the future. The period between 1830 and 1920 was the timebetween two major...
The project Conceptual Histories of the World and Global Translations that started in 2008 was a joint venture between Bo Stråth, Helsinki Uniersity and Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Århus University. Here texts and photos from the project's conferences until 2012 as well as its method, theory, and organization.
Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance Abstract An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand whythe grand design of a United Europe – with a common foreign policy and market yet enoughdiversity to allow for...
The hypocricy of democracy-through-market. London: Routledge 2010. Co-authored with Hagen Schulz-Forberg Abstract The Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was based on neoliberal ideas of a market-driven Europeaneconomy and democracy and continues to be seen as a new step...
Tensions and Contentions of a Concept Lars Magnusson and Bo Stråth (eds.), European Solidarities. Tensions and Contentions of a Concept. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang 2007. Abstract The book discusses the tensions between a market Europe and a social Europe, between the...
Defining a Political Order in Time and Space Hans-Åke Persson and Bo Stråth (eds.), Reflections on Europe. Defining a Political Order in Time and Space. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang 2007 Stråth has known Hans-Åke Persson, HÅP, since the mid-1990s. When Stråth returned...
The focus of this project was the diversity and plurality of cultural orientations and, moreover, ever-shifting cultural practices within Europe. Historical ruptures challenge continuities and instability coexist with stabiity.
Perceptions of social inequality at a European level were behind the initiation of this project. An important question was whether the emergence, interpretations and regulations of social inequalities is transformed by new centre-periphery structures in the EU. The project addressed the tension in the fact that EU is an economy but not a polity, a market but not a state. The focus was on the tension that emerges when social disintegration in the wake of market integration cannot be matched by redistributive politics to adjust for inequalities however they are defined.
