Europe and Its Global Entanglements
Overview
Europe is not a self-contained civilisation with fixed geographical, political or intellectual boundaries. It has been formed through relations with empires, neighbouring regions and postcolonial worlds, but also through asymmetries within Europe itself. My research examines these relations from the perspective of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe: parts of the continent that have repeatedly been treated as peripheral to the European story, even though they have played a central role in defining what Europe is and where its borders lie.
I approach Europe through comparative literature, intellectual history and memory studies. My work reconstructs how Europe has been imagined in Polish, Czech, Croatian, Balkan, Belarusian and Ukrainian contexts. It also traces the movement of ideas, memories and cultural models between European semi-peripheries, the continent’s institutional centres and the wider world.
A central proposition of this research is that Central Europe is not a fixed region. It is a moving political and symbolic frontier. Its centre changes whenever Europe must redefine its boundaries, security and political commitments. Central Europe is therefore not simply a territory located between East and West. It is one of the places from which the meaning of Europe has repeatedly been challenged and reconstructed.
This programme connects my earlier research on European identity and semi-peripheral modernisation with current work on Ukraine, post-imperial Europe and the global entanglements through which Europe has been made.
Projects and Current Work
Europe’s Uneven Globality
This ongoing research and public-writing programme examines Europe as a globally entangled but internally unequal political and intellectual space.
It focuses on three connected problems. The first concerns the relationship between European colonial histories and the legacies of Russian and Soviet domination. The second is the persistence of asymmetries between Europe’s institutional centres and its eastern and southern regions. The third concerns the production of knowledge: whose historical experiences are recognised as universally European, and whose remain classified as regional, peripheral or belated.
The programme develops the proposition that Europe cannot become post-imperial selectively. Western colonial histories and Russian imperialism require distinct historical accounts, but they must be considered within a shared European reckoning with empire. Russia’s war against Ukraine has made this task more visible and more urgent. Ukraine is not merely seeking admission to an already completed Europe. Its experience is forcing Europe to reconsider its own history, geography and political vocabulary.
Central Europe and the Moving Frontier of Europe
This current research and book project reinterprets Central Europe not as a stable territory between East and West, but as a changing frontier of European possibility.
It follows the category from nineteenth-century intellectual and political debates through the Habsburg and post-imperial settlements, the Cold War, the transformations after 1989 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It examines how the symbolic centre of Central Europe has moved between different cities, regions and political projects as Europe itself has faced successive crises.
The project argues that Central Europe moves east whenever the meaning and future of Europe are placed under pressure. Ukraine, and Kyiv in particular, have now become central to debates that were previously associated predominantly with Prague, Vienna, Budapest or Warsaw.
The project combines literary and intellectual history with questions of empire, sovereignty, democracy, war and European integration. It asks not only where Central Europe is, but what political and intellectual work the category performs when Europe must redefine its boundaries and commitments.
Selected Research Projects
Millennium: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Baptism of Eastern and Central Europe – Comparative Analysis
2019–2025 · Principal Investigator · National Science Centre, Poland
The project compared major millennium celebrations in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It examined how states, churches, scholars and intellectuals used distant pasts to construct modern political communities and competing visions of Europe.
Rather than treating anniversaries simply as commemorative events, the project approached them as laboratories in which historical knowledge, political legitimacy, religious identity and collective memory were produced. It also investigated how archaeology, historiography, literature, exhibitions, monuments and mass celebrations contributed to the creation of modern narratives about the origins of nations, states and European civilisation.
National Science Centre project record
Central European Romanticism in the Postcolonial Context
2012–2017 · Research-group member · National Programme for the Development of the Humanities
The project investigated whether and how postcolonial approaches could be adapted to the particular histories of Central Europe. Its aim was not simply to apply theories developed elsewhere, but to ask how postcolonial concepts change when viewed from societies subjected to imperial domination while simultaneously participating in their own regional hierarchies and national projects.
My work within the project focused on peripheral and decentered modernisations, Czech Romantic journalism and the need to develop historically localised forms of postcolonial analysis.
The Category of Europe in Contemporary Polish, Czech and Croatian Literature
2004–2005 · Principal Investigator · Ministry of Science and Information Technology
This project examined how competing ideas of Europe functioned in Polish, Czech and Croatian literature and intellectual debate.
It reconstructed the different historical positions from which these cultures imagined their relationship with Europe: Poland through its changing relationship with East and West, Czech culture through debates about its place within Western and Central Europe, and Croatia through its position between Central Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean.
The project provided the research foundations for my book Europe in Polish, Czech and Croatian Discourse: Critical Reconfigurations.
Books
Studying the Memory of Communism: Genealogies, Social Practices and Communication
Edited with Rigels Halili and Guido Franzinetti. Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, 2021, 306 pp.
This English-language volume examines how memories of communism have been produced, transmitted and contested across post-communist Europe.
Rather than treating “the memory of communism” as a single regional narrative, the volume brings together different national, generational and institutional experiences from Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Western Europe. It demonstrates that post-communist memory is shaped not only by the experience of the former political system, but also by later European integration, national memory regimes and transnational debates about violence, victimhood and historical responsibility.
The volume places Central and Eastern European memory within a broader European field instead of treating it as a separate regional exception.
Europe in Polish, Czech and Croatian Discourse: Critical Reconfigurations
Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, 2011, 432 pp. Published in Polish with an English summary.
The book reconstructs competing ideas of Europe in Polish, Czech and Croatian literature, political thought, historiography and cultural debate.
It shows that the region cannot be understood as a homogeneous “Eastern Europe.” Poland’s relationship with Europe has been shaped by its historical entanglement with the East; Czech debates by a strong orientation towards the West and Central Europe; and Croatian discussions by the country’s location between Central Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean.
The book moves beyond the post-1989 narrative of accession and Europeanisation. It traces the intellectual traditions that shaped regional understandings of Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These traditions remain important for explaining contemporary disagreements about European identity, sovereignty, borders and political belonging.
Selected Articles and Chapters
“Knowledge–Memory–Freedom: The Relevance of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize”
In Belarus: Faces of Resistance, edited by Olga V. Solovieva. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2025, pp. 179–184.
The chapter reflects on the decision to award the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
It examines the relationship between memory, knowledge and political freedom in a region marked by authoritarianism, war and attempts to erase evidence of state violence. The three laureates represent different national experiences, but their work demonstrates the shared importance of documentation, archives and civic knowledge in resisting repression.
The chapter places Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian struggles within a connected European history of human rights, memory activism and democratic resistance.
“Mnemonic Wars and Parallel Polis: The Anti-Politics of Memory in Central and Southeast Europe: Kosovar Women and Black/Roma Lives Matter”
With Agata Domachowska, Łukasz Gemziak and Francesco Trupia. Memory Studies 15, no. 6, 2022, pp. 1406–1419.
The article transfers the Central European concept of anti-politics into contemporary memory studies. It examines parallel forms of memory created outside dominant state narratives through two cases: women’s memories of war and sexual violence in Kosovo, and Black Lives Matter and Roma Lives Matter activism in Czechia.
It demonstrates how concepts originating in the political experience of communist Central Europe can contribute to transnational discussions of race, gender, violence and historical exclusion. Instead of treating Central European concepts as merely local, the article tests their relevance to broader problems of democratic participation and memory activism.
The publication also reflects an intergenerational research collaboration developed through student supervision, doctoral research and postdoctoral mentoring.
“The Politics of the Archive in Semi-Peripheries”
In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, edited by Ursula K. Heise et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 51–60.
The chapter examines the disappearance of the former “Second World” from many post-Cold War accounts of global literature and culture. While Western centres and postcolonial regions have acquired established positions within comparative research, Central and Eastern European semi-peripheries have frequently been rendered theoretically invisible.
The politics of the archive is crucial to this process. Sources produced in the semi-peripheries have often been dispersed, displaced or stored in institutions located elsewhere. Reconstructing these archives makes it possible to recover intellectual relations connecting Central and Eastern Europe both with Western academic centres and with non-European worlds.
The chapter therefore treats access to archives and the authority to interpret them as part of Europe’s internal geography of knowledge.
“The Primary Chronicle in Light of World(-)System Theories and Social Constructivism”
Russian History 44, nos. 2–3, 2017, pp. 150–171.
The article interprets the medieval Primary Chronicle through world-system analysis and social constructivism.
Instead of treating early Rus’ as the enclosed origin of a later national history, it places the chronicle within wider political, religious and cultural networks. The formation of Rus’ is understood through relations among Byzantium, Scandinavia, the steppe, Slavic societies and other centres and frontier zones.
This perspective connects Eastern European medieval history with broader structures of exchange and demonstrates how narratives of political origin were produced through interactions that exceeded the borders of later national and European historiographies.
“Decentered Modernisation – Peripheral Modernisations: Czech Romantic Journalism in a Postcolonial Perspective”
In Central European Romanticism in a Postcolonial Context, edited by Michał Kuziak and Bartłomiej Nawrocki. Warsaw: Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2016, pp. 233–253. Published in Polish.
The chapter examines Czech Romantic journalism as an expression of modernisation produced outside Europe’s dominant political and cultural centres.
It questions models in which European modernity moves in one direction from an innovative centre towards imitative peripheries. Czech intellectuals did not simply reproduce a ready-made Western model. They selectively translated, resisted and reconfigured competing European ideas in response to the political conditions of the Habsburg Empire and the requirements of national mobilisation.
The chapter develops the concept of multiple peripheral modernisations and shows how Central European experiences complicate singular accounts of European modernity.
“European Identity, Minor Transnationalism and a Semi-Peripheral Perspective”
In Debating European Identity: Bright Ideas, Dim Prospects, edited by Branislav Radeljić. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 51–78.
The chapter examines European identity from the semi-peripheral perspectives of Poland, Czechia and the post-Yugoslav states.
It challenges accounts that reduce Europe to a single Greek, Roman and Christian genealogy or assume that European identity is produced primarily by the continent’s established political and intellectual centres. Instead, it develops the concept of “minor Europes”: overlapping cultural and political formations whose experiences cannot be contained within a simple opposition between national identity and European integration.
Minor transnationalism makes it possible to analyse relations among Europe’s smaller, peripheral and semi-peripheral cultures without requiring every exchange to pass through a dominant centre. The chapter argues that these perspectives do not merely supplement an existing European narrative. They offer alternative ways of understanding Europe itself.
“The Category of ‘Central Europe’ in the Works of Milan Kundera, Yuri Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk”
Evropa 2, no. 2, 2002, pp. 131–154. Published in Russian.
This early article compares three influential literary mappings of Central Europe.
Kundera’s Central Europe is centred on the historical space between Russia and Western Europe. Stasiuk moves its cultural geography towards provincial, southeastern and borderland spaces. Andrukhovych introduces Ukraine into a category from which it had often been excluded.
The article contains an early formulation of an argument developed in my current research: Central Europe is not a geographically stable region but a mobile cultural and political construction. Its location and symbolic centre change together with Europe’s shifting borders, hierarchies and experiences of danger.
Selected Public Contributions
“Why Europe Should Reform Through Enlargement”
The Loop, forthcoming in 2026.
EU enlargement is usually presented as a concession offered by the European Union to states seeking membership. This essay reverses that perspective. Enlargement is also a mechanism through which the European Union can reform itself, develop stronger common institutions and adjust its political geography to the security environment created by Russia’s war.
Ukraine’s accession would not simply extend the existing Union eastwards. It would move the political centre of Europe and require the EU to rethink how responsibilities, resources and strategic capacities are shared across the continent.
The essay argues that enlargement should not be understood as the completion of Europe’s existing order. It can become an instrument for transforming that order.
Link to be added following publication.
“Europe Cannot Be Post-imperial Selectively”
IPS Journal, 8 July 2026.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed a blind spot in Europe’s historical memory. European debates have learned to recognise overseas colonialism more readily than the imperial formations that shaped the continent’s eastern half.
The essay argues that recognising Russian imperialism must not become a means of avoiding Western responsibility for colonialism. Conversely, confronting Western colonialism cannot require treating Russian domination of Ukraine and other neighbouring societies as merely a security problem.
A credible post-imperial Europe must recognise different forms of imperial rule without collapsing their historical distinctions or turning historical recognition into a competition between victims.
“Politics of Memory à Rebours: A Short Sketch about Andrzej Stasiuk’s Przewóz”
13 July 2021.
This essay reads Stasiuk’s novel as a counternarrative to heroic and nationalised accounts of the Second World War.
Set on the Bug River in 1941, the novel presents Europe’s eastern borderlands as a multilingual and unstable space shaped by German and Soviet violence, local conflicts and the struggle for survival. Its marginalised protagonists and its emphasis on women’s wartime experience undermine the conventional opposition between national heroes and anti-heroes.
Memory emerges instead through places, family stories, material remains and sensory experience. The European borderland is presented not as an empty margin between political centres, but as a space in which competing histories and identities overlap.
“The Kościuszko Statue in Washington, D.C., and Why We Should Leave Graffiti on It”
7 July 2020.
Written during the Black Lives Matter protests, the essay reconstructs the transatlantic histories embodied by the monument to Tadeusz Kościuszko in Washington, D.C.
It connects the American Revolution, Polish struggles against imperial rule, abolitionism, serfdom and the participation of Polish soldiers in the Haitian Revolution. The graffiti placed on the monument becomes a new layer in this connected history rather than an act that simply destroys memory.
The essay proposes understanding the monument as a palimpsest linking European, American and Caribbean struggles over freedom, racial hierarchy and political emancipation.
Selected Talks
“Utopias of the Past in Millennium Celebrations: Narratives on the Origins of the State, Nation and Religion as a Response to Social Crisis”
Council for European Studies Conference, Europe’s Past, Present and Future: Utopias and Dystopias, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 27–29 June 2023.
The paper examined millennium celebrations as political responses to periods of uncertainty and social crisis.
Narratives about the remote origins of states, nations and religious communities do not simply commemorate the past. They create idealised historical models that can be mobilised to legitimise contemporary institutions and political projects. The paper compared these mechanisms across Central and Eastern Europe and showed how utopian visions of the past helped produce competing ideas of European belonging.
“Archaeology and History Serving State and Church: The Celebration of the Millennium of Poland’s Christianity and Statehood in the Perspective of the History of the Humanities”
The Making of the Humanities X, Pittsburgh, 3–5 November 2022.
The paper analysed the role of archaeology, history and the humanities in the competing Polish millennium celebrations of the 1960s.
The conflict between the communist state and the Catholic Church was also a struggle over historical knowledge. Both sides mobilised scholars, archaeological discoveries, exhibitions and public rituals to construct rival genealogies of the Polish political community.
The paper placed this dispute within the wider history of the humanities and the use of academic knowledge in the construction of modern European nations.
“What Does It Mean to Be a Translingual Writer in Eastern and Central Europe?”
20th Annual Aleksanteri Conference, Eurasia and Global Migration, University of Helsinki, 27–29 October 2021.
The paper examined translingual writing as a form of intellectual and literary mobility.
It asked how migration between languages complicates national literary histories and transforms the position of Central and Eastern Europe within world literature. Translingual authors make visible the limits of national and monolingual models of European culture, while also demonstrating the unequal conditions under which writers from different parts of Europe enter global literary circulation.
“Comparative Literature and World(-)System Theory: An Anti-Eurocentric Perspective on European Literature”
Invited lecture, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China, 21 November 2016.
The lecture reconsidered European literature from the perspective of world-system analysis.
It argued that Europe’s literary history cannot be reconstructed exclusively from its established cultural centres. It must include relations connecting European cores, internal semi-peripheries and non-European literary systems.
An anti-Eurocentric history of European literature does not remove Europe from the analysis. It reconstructs Europe through the exchanges, asymmetries and appropriations that connected it with the wider world.
“Voices from the (Semi-)Peripheries: East and Central European Debates on European Identity”
Re-Inventing Eastern Europe, Prague, 15–16 November 2013.
The paper examined how intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe negotiated the competing labels of Eastern Europe, Central Europe and East-Central Europe.
It argued that these geographical categories express political aspirations and hierarchies of belonging rather than neutral territorial descriptions. To define a society as Central rather than Eastern European is also to make a claim about its place within European history, modernity and political order.
The paper provided an early formulation of the semi-peripheral perspective that continues to inform my research on Europe’s internal asymmetries.