Everyday Europe and Tomorrow's Europe: Is There a Future for Social Transnationalism? A Response to Readers

Abstract

We thank our respondents for a set of very interesting commentaries As with our own text, these thoughts and insights have themselves inevitably been overtaken by events outside our immediate academic control As we write, the world has been enveloped in a pandemic that apparently strikes at the heart of globalisation (as it was), after a decade in which the growing threat of impending or emergent crises to it has been heavily signalled on all sides Ironically — in terms of our core concerns — the present crisis, itself a truly global event, clearly intertwines with the mobilities and transactions that most defined our now lost era A disease that has spread through expansive human travel and unconstrained human interaction has been tackled everywhere with immobility and social lockdown Most likely, mobilities — and Europe itself — will not be the same after the coronavirus and the new and revised forms of governance it has imposed Just how different it will be remains to be seen It may not be right just yet to lament Die Welt von Gestern in despairing Stefan Zweig-like mode (Zweig 1942), but surely neither can we count on Europe or the world going back to “business as usual” Nearly everything everywhere currently seems to be defaulting to highlybounded, primarily nationalised forms of governance, that may well veer towards extreme nationalist governmentality and even eugenics depending on the severity of the crisis The pandemic is thus raising echoes of the Dark Continent—that is, Europe’s dismal pre-1945 past (see Mazower’s prescient work, 1998)—as well as many revived utopian ideas about community, collective responsibility, ecological consciousness, or a new and proactive focus on welfare coverage and public health We will not be able to adjudicate on all this, but these stakes do need to be evoked What is clear is that Everyday Europe, which was published in early 2019, written 2015 to 2019, and based on research conducted from 2010 to 2014, will now assuredly be a timepiece, the portrait of a decade and a lost world But for that reason its chapters and its readers’ responses may have a great value in specifying the extent to which mobilities and cross-border “social transnationalism”, as we call it, had transformed and was transforming the continent before the fateful year 2020 It may then become a yardstick of what we are losing as we speak