Europe’s Uneven Globality

Europe is often described as though it first took shape within its own borders and only later entered into relations with the wider world. My research begins from the opposite premise: Europe was made through those relations.

Empires, colonialism and decolonisation, migration, war, socialist internationalism and the global circulation of people and ideas did not merely influence an already existing Europe. They helped produce its institutions, identities, internal divisions and claims to universality. Europe has always been global—but its globality has never been evenly distributed.

Rethinking Europe from Its Eastern Frontiers

I approach these questions from Central and Eastern Europe. This is not simply a regional specialisation. It is a perspective from which some of the fundamental contradictions of Europe become especially visible.

The societies of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe have been positioned simultaneously inside and outside dominant accounts of European modernity. They participated in European empires, experienced imperial domination, pursued national sovereignty and entered successive projects of regional and supranational integration. Their intellectuals repeatedly negotiated between Western models, local histories and relationships with Russia, Asia and the postcolonial world.

This position complicates the familiar division between a European centre that produces ideas and a periphery that merely receives them. Central and Eastern Europe has been a site of translation, mediation, resistance and intellectual production. Its histories allow us to ask not only how European ideas travelled eastward, but also how concepts, experiences and political projects emerging outside Europe’s dominant centres reshaped Europe itself.

Central Europe is therefore not a fixed geographical container. It is a moving cultural and political frontier. Its boundaries shift whenever the meaning, security and future of Europe are contested. The eastward movement of this frontier, particularly in relation to Ukraine, forces Europe to reconsider where its political and symbolic centre lies.

Empire, Socialism and Alternative Globalities

One strand of my work concerns the afterlives of empire and the place of socialist societies in the global history of postcolonial thought.

Conventional accounts often organise the twentieth-century world around a relationship between Western colonial powers and the postcolonial Global South. The socialist Second World appears only marginally in this narrative: as an external supporter of decolonisation, an instrument of Soviet foreign policy or an alternative form of empire.

My research on socialist postcolonialism reconstructs a more complex history. Writers, scholars, journalists, travellers and cultural institutions in socialist Central and Eastern Europe participated in debates about colonialism, racial inequality, national liberation and global modernity. They developed relationships with societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, translated their literature and political ideas, and interpreted decolonisation through the experiences of societies that understood themselves as both European and historically subordinated.

These connections did not escape hierarchy. Socialist internationalism combined genuine solidarity with propaganda, paternalism and inherited forms of Orientalism. Yet it created forms of global imagination that cannot be reduced either to Western colonialism or to Soviet geopolitical strategy.

I describe these formations as alternative globalities: modes of global connection and knowledge production that emerged outside the institutions dominating the Western world. Recovering them expands the geography of postcolonial thought and changes our understanding of Europe’s place in the history of decolonisation.

Internal Asymmetries and the Boundaries of Europe

A second strand of my work examines Europe’s internal asymmetries.

The distinction between East and West is not only geographical. It is reproduced through hierarchies of political authority, economic capacity, academic prestige and cultural recognition. European integration has reduced many historical divisions, but it has not eliminated the unequal distribution of the power to define what counts as European experience, knowledge or expertise.

These asymmetries become particularly visible during periods of crisis. War, migration and debates about enlargement reveal that Europe’s boundaries are not settled. They are continually renegotiated through decisions about solidarity, sovereignty, security and historical responsibility.

EU enlargement should therefore not be understood only as the extension of an established institutional order to new members. Enlargement also exposes the limitations of that order and can become a mechanism for reforming it. The admission of countries located on Europe’s shifting eastern frontier requires the European Union to rethink its institutions, strategic priorities and inherited distribution of political authority.

Seen from this perspective, Central and Eastern Europe is not a region that must simply complete its adaptation to a finished Europe. It is one of the places from which Europe is being remade.

Knowledge Geopolitics and the University

A third strand concerns knowledge itself: how it is produced, circulated, authorised and protected.

Knowledge does not move through an empty space. It depends on languages, archives, universities, funding systems, technological infrastructures and international networks. These structures determine who can participate in global research, which questions become visible and whose concepts acquire universal authority.

My earlier work examined translingual intellectuals, academic migration, research schools and informal environments of knowledge transfer. It showed that ideas are transformed as they move between languages and institutions, and that intellectual innovation often occurs through connections that remain invisible in formal histories of disciplines.

My current research extends these questions to research security, open science, strategic autonomy and the uneven geography of European research capacity. International cooperation remains indispensable to science, but openness can no longer be treated as an institutionally effortless or geopolitically neutral condition. Universities must learn how to protect researchers, data and infrastructures without retreating into intellectual isolation or national protectionism.

This is also a question of European inequality. Institutions differ greatly in their capacity to manage security risks, build international partnerships and sustain advanced research infrastructures. Without shared European capacity, research security may become a privilege of universities that are already powerful.

The university is therefore both an object of my research and a field of institutional practice. My work as Vice-Rector for Research and Vice-President of YERUN allows me to examine how arguments about excellence, openness, security and distributed capacity operate within real organisations and European policy debates.

A Connected Research Programme

These three areas—global entanglements, internal European asymmetries and knowledge geopolitics—form a single research programme.

Socialist postcolonialism demonstrates that Central and Eastern Europe participated in global debates about empire and decolonisation. The moving frontier of Central Europe shows that the boundaries and internal hierarchies of Europe remain politically unsettled. Research on universities reveals how similar asymmetries are reproduced through the institutions that create and authorise knowledge.

Together, they lead to a broader proposition: Europe cannot understand its global position without reconsidering the places it has treated as peripheral—both beyond its borders and within them.

To study Europe in a global context is therefore not simply to add other regions to an established European narrative. It is to ask how encounters with those regions, as well as with Europe’s own internal differences, produced the categories through which Europe understands itself.

Europe was made by the world. It continues to be remade from its moving frontiers.