Periphery is opportunity – decolonial scholars from Central and South-Eastern Europe say

The transcript of an online discussion on the book “Reconfiguring EU Peripheries. Political elites, contestation and geopolitical shifts”. 

On 30 October 2024 the Helsinki University Press, Pro and Contra series hosted an online presentation of the open access book “Reconfiguring EU Peripheries. Political Elites, Contestation and Geopolitical Shifts”. Building on the scholarly contributions to the volume published in 2024, the debate on “Exploring new and old peripheries in Europe” took place.

The book offered reflections on a number of questions related to the EU’s peripheries:

Which states belong to the peripheries of the European Union? 

What is the geopolitical impact of recent geopolitical events on the transformation of the EU’s peripheries? 

In exploring the diversity of the European Union’s interactions with its peripheries, the book focuses on a period of rising regional tensions, most recently marked by the war in Ukraine. The volume provides conceptual clarifications as well as a wealth of empirically applied case studies on the various motivations underlying the attitudes of political elites towards the EU in states such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Hungary, Kosovo, Moldova, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine.

Important members of the international academic community, such as Dr Ali Onur Özçelik, Lecturer at the Department of International Relations at Eskișehir Osmangazi University, Turkey, together with two members of our academic community from the Department of International Relations and European Integration at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies (SNSPA) in Bucharest, Lecturers Miruna Butnaru-Troncotă and Radu Cucută as co-editors, and Nicolae Toderaș, drd. Daniel Pascal and Dr Oana Ion as co-authors, were involved in preparing and publishing the book.

During the debate, moderated by Dr Taru Haapala, editor-in-chief of the Pro and Contra collection, Helsinki University Press and lecturer at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, two special guests – Dr Veronika Sušová-Salminen (member of !Argument & Cross-Border Talks team) and Dr Francesco Trupia (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland) – discussed the changing and sometimes treacherous valences of the peripheries inside and outside the EU.

Veronika Sušová-Salminen is a member of the editorial team of Cross-border Talks, while Francesco Trupia is one of the returning authors of the same Poland-based regional cross-border media. Cross-border Talks is the media partner of the online event and has been granted the right to publish the transcript of the discussion. 

Taru Haapala:

Hello and good afternoon everyone. My name is Taru Haapala. I am the editor-in-chief of the book series Pro et Contra.

We are also joined by the series’ managing editor, Anna Kronlund, and members of the editorial board. The series is published by the Finnish Political Science Association in cooperation with Helsinki University Press, and we have representatives from both publishers here today. On behalf of all the organisers, I would like to thank you for joining us this afternoon.

You are all very welcome to this launch event for the third title in the series. It’s called Reconfiguring EU Peripheries: Political Elites, Contestation and Geopolitical Shifts. It is edited by Miruna Butnaru-Troncotă, Ali Onur Özçelik and Radu Alexandru Cucută.

Pro et Contra is an open access book series, launched in 2019 to promote free access to high quality academic research on politics. It highlights historical and contemporary political debates with relevance to ongoing international controversies. This new edited volume is an important and timely contribution to research on EU integration, with several case studies.

It is the result of the EU-funded project Jean Monnet Network, Linking to Europe at the Periphery, or LEAP for short. The book was also funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and distributed by the Finnish Federation of Learned Societies. The launch event of this webinar is sponsored by the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing and our media partner is Cross-Border Talks.

We now have one hour and 15 minutes set aside for this event. We will first hear from the editors of the book, who will give a brief introduction. Then I will introduce our two guest speakers, who have been invited to give their critical comments on the book.

After the responses from the editors, I will open the floor for questions and comments from the audience. It is my pleasure to introduce you to the two editors present. We have Ali Onur Özçelik, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Eskișehir Osmangazi University in Turkey.

And Radu Alexandru Cucută is a lecturer at the Department of International Relations and European Integration at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania. Ali and Radu will now briefly present the book. Please go ahead.

Ali Onur Özçelik:

Okay. Thank you very much for the kind invitation. And hello everyone.

First of all, this is Ali Onur Özçelik from Eskișehir Osmangazi University. I’m very honoured to take part in this online event. I’d like to thank Helsinki University Press, especially Ms Taru Haapala and Anna Kronlund. And, of course, to my dear co-editors, Miruna Troncotă and Radu Cucută, for bringing us together for such a timely gathering. I’m also very much looking forward to hearing insights into our book from Veronika Sušová-Salminen and Francesco Trupia. I’m sure they will provide a critical analysis that will allow us all to learn from their perspective.

I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I would like to tell you that this book is actually one of the main outcomes of a project called Linking to Europe at the Periphery. I think it is helpful to say a few words about this project because this book is one of the outputs or outcomes of this three-year project. The project is actually led by the Middle East Technical University of Ankara in Turkey. What we are actually trying to do in this project is to ask a simple question: how is European integration taught, learned, experienced and contested in the EU’s periphery? In this case we focused on five countries – Turkey, Romania, Kosovo, Georgia and Ukraine. 

This project tried to explore how these countries, each of course with different status as EU candidates, potential candidates, neighbours or member states, engage with the EU. This highlights that this is a unique, special and structural challenge that these regions are currently facing because of their geographical and economic distance from the core of the European Union. 

The project has two main objectives. Firstly, to build a network between EU studies institutions, to share knowledge and foster collaboration between researchers, and secondly, to have a lasting impact on academic students and civil society. We had several workshops, open access publications. This is one of the open access publications.

In this book we actually try to analyse some peripheral aspects of the political elites, which is one of the aims of the project. I think this is important for understanding the contestations between these countries, how the political elites think and what geopolitical shifts have done for these countries. I’d like to hand over to our main editor, Miruna Troncotă.

I think she’ll elaborate on the book’s themes and significance. Thank you very much to everyone who joined us today.

Miruna Troncotă-Butnaru:

Hello everyone. I’m actually from the region. I’m coming from Belgrade, so I’m experiencing the periphery on its own, and I’m actually challenging the periphery, because there was a problem, but it was solved. So here we have many solutions in the periphery.

Myself and the whole team, also Professor Bașak Alpan, who could not come at the moment, but she will be with us later – she was the leader of this project and she thought about this concept of the periphery that everyone is afraid of. And we, I would say, had the courage to use the word periphery. We put it in the plural to soften it for everybody. It’s EU peripheries. And we were inspired by a book by Noel Parker about the geopolitics of the European Union and Europe.

We started from this post-structuralist understanding of a periphery, that it’s not defined in a hierarchical way, but in a symbolic, empowering way. Starting from that, we were very lucky that we represented very different countries in this Erasmus-funded network. And that is how we organised the book. We have a total, as you could see by downloading our book, which is open access, we have a total of 10 chapters. The first chapter is more theoretical. We try to give an overview of how we designed the book, but we also try to give our own view of these peripheries in the plural.

What does it mean and why are they being reconfigured? How are they reconfigured? And that is why today’s debate with our two very, very special and distinguished scholars is about old and new peripheries, what we knew about periphery and perhaps the new elements that we are not discussing enough about these peripheries.

And that is the first chapter that myself, Radu, Ali and Oana Ion have tried to elaborate and put up for discussion as the theoretical basis of the book. And then we start with the case studies, which I would say are the most enriching in the whole book, because there are case studies that had a similar structure. They were based on original, qualitative, semi-structured interviews with political elites in all the countries that we included.

So we divided the countries according to their relations with the European Union. And that is also a problem, because our division is no longer valid. Things are so fluid in our region.

In the first part we were talking about the EU’s own periphery, so the countries that are members of the EU. We had only two cases, Romania and Hungary. We discussed from different perspectives how these countries could be seen as peripheries or how they are seen as peripheries in reality. The chapter on Romania was co-edited, written by myself and Radu. The one on Hungary, which is also very, very interesting, is by Melek Aylin Özoflu and Cristina Arato from Hungary itself. 

Then the second part is about the EU accession countries, the countries that are candidates and are already in a kind of advanced stage. We were very lucky to have a chapter on Ukraine. And I think Taru knows very well that we were very worried about whether we would still have Ukraine. In our LEAP project we had a partner from the Ivan Franko University in Lviv from the very beginning, and unfortunately, of course, after the war started, we were not able to contact them. Then they were out of the country for a few months and then they came back. So we assumed that they would not make it. But we insisted because we believed that it was a great asset to have a perspective on the Ukrainian political elites. And we were lucky in the end that Professor Roman Kalytchak from Ivan Franko University and Andriy Tyushka, who teaches at the College of Europe in Natolin, Poland, made it and opened this section with the chapter on Ukraine. This is also methodologically innovative, I might add.

Then we have Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Turkey. Ali Onur together with Basak, our two core partners in the project, were the ones who co-authored the chapter on Turkey. Another very interesting and strange, I would say, for many descriptions of the European periphery. I think they did a great job in discussing why Turkey is included in this discussion. Then in the last part, in part three, we have what were then candidate countries, but their identities are still fluid. And those were Kosovo and Georgia.

The chapter on Georgia was signed by Professor David Aprasidze. Actually, I would have liked to have had him in the debate, because I think his chapter sheds a particular light on exactly what is going on in Georgia at the moment, because the title of the chapter is From Dreaming of to Dreaming with Europe: How the Political Elites in Georgia Frame and Contest the EU. It’s an analysis of the European Dream Party, which is right in the middle of the discussion about the elections.

And also Kosovo, of course, a disputed state that, for example, Romania and four other EU member states don’t recognise, is definitely a great addition to our wide range of case studies. So we have eight case studies with original raw data that we have tried in some way to put into discussion and question what we mean by periphery and not only what we mean but what political elites who are negotiating their relationship with the EU mean by their position as periphery or not, because some countries do not see themselves as periphery at all. And then the last chapter, the 10th chapter, is the concluding chapter where we come back to our understanding of peripheries.

We try to offer further avenues for research and we underline what were the main original insights of each chapter, of each case study. And I think that is what we propose for discussion. And I’m very much looking forward to developing, let’s say, new arguments, critiques.

We are very open and eager for critiques because we believe that these are really crucial and timely discussions about how the EU interacts with its surroundings and with itself. I think most of us, the academics who are here, are interested in that and contribute to that.

Taru Haapala:

OK. Thank you, Miruna. I’m a bit cold here, but it’s OK. We have the majority and thank you very much for introducing the book. Very exciting and innovative chapters.

I’ll briefly introduce our two guest speakers. We have Veronika Sušová-Saminen, who is a comparative historian specialising in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, with a methodological focus on world system analysis and the dependency school, with some influences from postcolonial critique. She holds a PhD from Charles University in Prague and has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Global Studies in Prague.

She’s also a political analyst focusing on contemporary Russia in the global context, a contributor to the Cross-border Talks and editor-in-chief of the webzine Argument. Welcome, Veronika. Let’s start with your critical comments.

Veronika Sušová-Saminen:

Okay. I have prepared a small presentation to hopefully keep the time down and to make sure that everybody can see what I am talking about.

First of all, of course, I would like to thank you for the invitation. It is a great honour for me to be here and to make a few critical or more or less critical remarks. I congratulate all the authors and also the publisher on the book. I think it is a very interesting and important contribution.

I would like to emphasise the fact that the book is being distributed as a commons. It’s not for money, and I think that’s very important. We are academics, we know how important that is, especially in the case of books that are supported by public money, or research that is supported by public money. I would like to emphasise that I really like it and I think it is very important that the peripheral issues are discussed by scholars from the periphery. I think that is very, very important. It’s not just a small detail.

I think it’s one of the things that could change something that I’m going to talk about in a moment, which is the epistemological dependence of the peripheries. As I’m a scholar who’s very interested in the intersection between structuralism and constructivism in relation to postcolonial and decolonial approaches, I would like to maybe start with some structural things in this, which I understand that the book was methodologically based more on constructivism, but I still think that it’s very important to talk about structure and it’s something that still influences symbolic peripherality, or it’s even the basement for it in the current conditions. And also I think that’s why the term periphery is not so popular and it’s seen as a pejorative. Behind it, there are a lot of inequalities and basically the power dynamics that some actors, especially political actors in some regions, don’t like to see openly.

So I think these are important things. Core or centre and periphery is a metaphor that, as you know, has been used methodologically for probably five decades. It has been widely criticised.

It is, of course, in a way schematic for schematism. It is criticised. We also have different terms, you know, like semi-core, semi-periphery and so on.

I would like to emphasise that it is very important to understand what this metaphor is about, to understand that there is a particular power dynamic behind it. The power that is constitutive for the relations between the centre and the periphery, usually, if we stay in the strict way, linked to dependency and interdependency, these two terms that show that of course the power dynamic is not strictly hierarchical, as the authors of the book emphasise, but it is a two-way street with a lot of nuances. So this is very important.

It’s important to realise that without a centre there is no periphery or peripheries and without peripheries there is no centre. That is a really important thing. Finally, if you look at the book itself and if you look at the way Europe is divided into core and periphery – inside the EU, outside the EU – we have to realise that this is still the result of so-called historical capitalism. It’s the result of the development that started at the beginning of the 15th century and has continued until now, in which I think two important phenomena are absolutely crucial to understand. That’s colonialism and empire – until now.

But when we talk about power, and here I come from the move from structuralism to or between structuralism and post-structuralism and constructivism, of course we have to realise that there are multi-dimensions of power relations. It’s not just one thing. So if we, if a structuralist would say it is about politics and economics, I would say it is about that of course.

That’s very important, but it’s also about symbolic power, ideological power, cultural power and epistemological power. These are important dimensions of these power relations between the core and the periphery. And what I particularly like about the book, if we’re staying in this constructivist era, which I want to emphasise is really important, is the fact that it takes the periphery first of all as something serious, not as something to be taken for granted.

I don’t want to be called “from the periphery” because I feel bad about it, because I realise that subconsciously it’s about power dynamics and probably also about power inequalities. But I like that there is this focus on, first of all, the elites and how they perceive the European integration process and the European Union, how they relate to it, using the periphery now negatively or positively. I think this is something that contributes to European studies today, because if you look at, for example, the enlargement of the European Union in the 1990s and 2000s (I’m Czech, so my country joined in 2004, as you know, between 1994 and 2004), this is true of many other countries. In my opinion, this relationship has been understudied and there has been no focus on the power dynamics. There was not much talk about whether there is a periphery or we will become a periphery or we are a periphery joining Western Europe and we have an unequal position. I think this is a very important focus of the book and I really liked it in that sense. But as I say, I think the structure is still important, because the structure will tell you a lot about ideology, a lot about things like Euro-orientalism, racism within the European Union and how the way how the elites perceive the EU and how their own social blocs are formed in their own states and how they are connected with the transnational capital and the European capital.

I understand that the book had to focus on one thing, but this dimension is still there and I think it’s important. Now I want to talk very briefly about the relationship between the peripheries and the political crisis, which is very important in the book. It’s about geopolitical shifts, it’s also about the policrisis.

You know there have been a lot of crises recently and I think that’s an important point that I’m going to talk about in the third slide about, let’s say, emancipation of the peripheries. The way in which peripheries could start to think differently about their own positions because I think when you have this power dynamic between core and periphery you always have a kind of situation when crisis comes. Crisis is usually reflected differently in the peripheries and differently in the core. For the core, crisis means loss of authority and this is what we are basically witnessing since 2007. If you look at the centre-periphery or centre-peripheries relationship in the EU and the neighbourhood as this book is still going on you have to realise that this is something that is embedded in neoliberal globalisation and western hegemony. When Western hegemony started to get into trouble, I’m not talking about some kind of decline of the West and so on, but there is a crisis and there is a continuous crisis of Western hegemony and we can see it in many other examples.

Of course this has been reflected in the periphery in a very different way, unfortunately not very often in an emancipatory way. So we have many crises, I’m just going to put some of them here, and I think specifically we have to realise that the global financial crisis was this hyper-crisis that really shook the western hegemony, but within the European Union and the European integration process and the accession process, probably the euro crisis, Brexit and the migration crisis were the most important ones, because they really shook the European Union internally and they created new spaces of contestation for elites especially in the periphery. Remember, the euro crisis was about how to solve the crisis in southern Europe.

It has really shaken the faith of southern Europeans in the European integration process and in their position in the European Union. It has also shaken the belief in the democratic nature of the European Union, if you remember the Greek referendum and so on. Then there was Brexit, which created an exception, which is also not good, and the migration crisis, which created a huge divergence in the Eastern European part of the European Union, because these countries have a completely different experience, historically formed and so on, and migration became a huge problem for them.

Then we have the Ukrainian crisis, which is important for this geopolitical shift, basically the security crisis or the crisis of the security architecture in the European Union, pandemics, the Russian war in Ukraine, energy. A lot of crises together that we can call a policrisis. These create the spaces for a kind of new way of how peripheries react to it and the book shows the different reactions very well.

Somewhere it is a rise of Euro-scepticism, somewhere it is in opposition, for example in Turkey, a rise of pragmatism and a rejection of the normative power of the European Union. Somewhere, as in Moldova, the normative power of the European Union is still very important. But of course it is under pressure from the geopolitical changes and shifts that we know started with the war in Ukraine. So there are many examples that you can give of where this contestation is coming from.

In a place like Romania, which I like, because the Czech case is very similar, the struggle is hidden in a kind of ambivalent Euro-scepticism and a discourse about becoming a colony of the EU. This colonial concept is very important, but it is not emancipatory. That’s the important thing. It’s just a criticism that doesn’t question the main problems within the European Union. And the last part that I would like to talk about, which comes up again and again in the book, and I think Miruna said it at the beginning, is that the periphery, the world itself, and the state of being on the margins, being on the periphery, I think it is also an opportunity.

First of all, as I said, it is a mirror of the huge problems that are at the core of capitalism. Peripheries are always a kind of mirror and they always show that something is going on. Unfortunately, they’re not very often able to reform or change things because they’re peripheries, that’s the problem, but they could be important as laboratories of that change.

What I think about periphery and emancipation is very brief, because in 15 minutes I couldn’t go too deep. These are four important points that I think should be emphasised: two are basically what is not a problem and two are what is a problem. So, first of all, really being on the periphery and using the term periphery marginality and so on is really not something pejorative in my opinion.

It should be used very freely and should always show what is behind it, which is what I was trying to say at the beginning. There is a certain power dynamic. It’s not one-sided, it’s not always hierarchical, but there is power, there are dependencies, there are interdependencies. Power can be symbolic, it can be economic. They always interact. It’s not one way, it’s just one dimension. 

Then the next thing that I think is typical of peripheries, and we see it in books in many places, is ambivalence – being on the edge of something, in between, being West and East together, having both Eastern and Western characteristics, a dynamic identity.  This is not a problem. It’s the problem of the Western way of thinking and the modern way of thinking that you have to put everything in one order, in one box, and if you don’t fit into that box you’re in trouble. 

On the other hand, we have to realise that these are composite parts of historical processes or historical processes and of course of historical capitalism and they are part of peripheral identity. I think this way should be developed more and used as a methodological approach and so on. Ambivalence is not really a problem. 

What is interesting, what is the problem and what prevents the emancipation of the peripheries in the EU and outside the EU is, in my opinion, the so-called imitative development. This is a huge issue. I will just touch on it very briefly. Imitation, in my opinion, is typical for peripheries because it is a part of the dependence of peripheries very often on the core and we could see it in the last 30 years in the accession process of European integration. It was very much based on the imitation of Western models, but it was a big lie or myth. The models of peripheral capitalism from core capitalism were imposed in the periphery, which could never work. We weren’t looking for the solution to the peripheries within the peripheries, we were basically looking for it by moving one model to another. It could never work. It just created frustration, illiberal rebellion in many countries and so on.

This is also the problem that I was talking about in terms of epistemologies, how we think about how we structure knowledge. Very often in the peripheries there is also this academic imperialism and imitation which again prevents us from seeing what is the real problem in the peripheries, how to solve these problems and also how to change the European Union and the dynamics and the relations with the European Union with the outside world. And then finally, what is the problem, is our whiteness, this is I think one point that I would like to mention here and it’s maybe a little bit outside the scope of the book, but again, if you want to think about peripherality in the EU and outside in an emancipatory and critical way, we should realise that in the peripheries very often there is this idea that we are white people and we are on this privileged part of capitalism. In fact it is not so and it is just that many of our political elites and media people are trying to push this kind of ideology to keep us from understanding that there is this power dynamic and there are inequalities that need to be challenged and that are causing more and more problems. They emerge particularly in times of crisis, as I said, so those would be some of my comments on the issue of the central periphery in the EU and outside the book as well. Thank you very much.

Taru Haapala:

Thank you Veronika, very insightful presentation. Let’s move on to the next speaker. Francesco Trupia holds a PhD in Political Philosophy and is currently working at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, where he conducts research in the field of minority and migration studies in Southeast and Eastern Europe. Francesco also works as a policy analyst.

He is part of the ninth cycle of the Young Academics Network at the Foundation for European Progressive Studies in Brussels. He has contributed to policy studies at the Institute of European Democrats in Brussels and the Kosovo Foundation for Open Society in Pristina. Welcome Francesco, the floor is yours.

Francesco Trupia:

Thank you Taru, thank you for this kind invitation and for having me. I would like to send my congrats to the editors for this really refreshing book, and also for Veronika because of her comments. I’m a bit in trouble because I think Veronika and I are on the same page and you have anticipated a couple of points that I wanted to talk about, especially in relation to the problem of epistemology and hegemony, and also  the problem of whiteness and emancipation. But let me begin with commenting on the book by challenging even more the post-structuralist approach of the book in order to have an equal version of the structuralist and the post-structuralist perspective.

Hence, I would like to challenge more [the discussion] and open up new research questions that are extremely important for scholars. First of all, let me share with you why I really like the book. I was born in an EU periphery, I’m originally from Sicily, Agrigento, whose administration goes to Lampedusa, which is the island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea which has seen the most the problems and the crisis of the European Union from migration to the failed Arab revolutions in North Africa. [The island stands on the margins of the] the European Union, on the external border of the EU, so I have myself experienced what it means to grow up as a child with the enthusiasm of the European Union and seeing how the political elites who have been supporting the European Union, campaigning and also making inroads into politics with the watchword of the European Union, and now they are turning against the European Union. So from this point of view, I really like the book’s viewpoint which, based on a qualitative perspective, looks at the political elites in the peripheries.

I think this is paramount if we really want to understand why the European Union project is not anymore [a project] full of enthusiasm [and] most of the time many have a very negative perception of the European Union [today], even among those people who have benefited from the European Union, and the European Union is not winning hearts anymore; this is something that is happening in the peripheries and paradoxically maybe in a post-structuralist understanding of the peripheries [helps us see how] they are becoming the center of the political debates in the European Union. [At the same time] here I agree on taking in consideration the structure of racial capitalism and the historical process, [yet without overlooking] the post-structuralist approach to the concept of periphery. I was also thinking that we really need to change not only the concept of the center and the periphery but also the language of and for the peripheries. I mean, how do we speak about the peripheries? And, I think it is also extremely important, the question of how sublatern speak? Can they speak? Hence, now we have for sure understood that peripheries can speak, but at the same time I think [it is important to raise the following question:] how peripheries should speak? I think it’s extremely important. It’s not only a matter of epistemology but also a matter of epistemic justice.  This is why I really liked the book, and I said it was very refreshing reading it. I would like to thank Miruna because she sent me the book during the summertime and I really enjoyed reading it throughout the summer break. This is not a book about the peripheries written by scholars working on peripheries, but it’s actually completely the opposite. It’s a book written from the peripheries by authors who are working and writing in and from the peripheries. I think this is extremely important to avoid the growth of redundancy among the so-called “experts” of the European Union, writing tons of publications from Brussels, Berlin, London, Paris, with due respect, they are introducing nothing new in the scholarship. I think this is also a very good critique that the book is conveying to the scholarship – we need to really change the language, the scholarly language, of addressing the problem of peripheries [and at the same time conveying] a very strong political message that peripheries are now at the center, and they have become a new paradigm to look at Europe and the European Union in particular.

Second, we are all the time burdened as scholars and researchers about how we engage with peripheries, and I was considering [the following issues:] why don’t we really think of how the center is benefiting from peripheries and exploiting the peripheries? Here, I am on the same page with Veronica when she’s talking about structuralism and you present racism in a more structuralist way along with the problem of whiteness. [In this regard], we have seen how many peripheries have become the center for the solution of problems at the center of the EU. I give you a very timely example: when it comes to migration, Italy and Albania are coming together to solve the problem of migration. [In other words], Italy – one of the  EU founders, is using Albania, which is considered to be in the periphery of the EU [and in transition toward the latter], is now the new country where migration is going to be solved. Of course, this is just a tic-for-tac approach of the European Union, nothing is going to be solved though this kind of project, of course. What is at stake is that migration is becoming once again a commodity along with the periphery of the European Union. Edi Rama in Albania is just flirting with President Georgia Meloni to find another way for the integration fatique, [which has been provoked by the so-called French-German strategy toward the Western Balkans in the last couple of years. So, we see how Albania has become the center of a new political project which even Miss von der Leyen is very happy about; she said it publicly.

This is exactly another example of how the book is on the right path to challenge the [EU state of affairs when it comes to addressing the issues of peripheries]. From a more post-structuralist perspective, let’s not talk just about peripheries as a monolithic or homogeneous concept. Let’s try to think of peripheries-within-a-periphery, and peripheries-within-the-center. We have to unpack the concept of both centers and peripheries [to advance a] new paradigm. When I was reading the chapter on Ukraine, for instance, political elites in Ukraine do not think of themselves as part of a peripheral country. I was thinking of two peripheries living within a periphery in the Western Balkans, such as Republika Srpska and North Kosovo: both are peripheries within a peripheral state – be it Kosovo or Bosnia – but they think of themselves as a central part of a new project. The “all-Serb manifesto”, which now is bringing back to the idea – a very scary idea – of having a “greater Serbia” is [giving them the impression to Republika Srpska and North Kosovo] to stop considering themselves as peripheries. 

This leads us to think once again of the epistemological problem: how do we approach, and convey and raise, the right research questions concerning peripheries-within-the-center? Because of my research I was in Brussels and also in Berlin, and I was talking with the so-called “Balkan diaspora” there. I have seen how the periphery is replicated within the center of power, and also we need to understand peripheries as spaceless. The space cannot be understood sometimes in a structuralized way because it’s very fluid and perhaps the post-structuralist approach I think it’s a great fit for the book and for new research. I remember having thousands of conversations with people who were just telling me that, among the diaspora, “there is not urban mentality”, The [project of the] European Union is to become a borderless space – the Schengen area – an idea that will challenge more the notion of peripheries. 

Lastly, Veronica rightly addressed the problem of crisis, also mirroring the problem of hegemony and the western hegemony in particular. Let’s say that I see not only the periphery as an opportunity but the crisis in itself is an opportunity.  When Veronica mentioned [the tandem of] crisis and hegemony, she brought me back to my beloved Antonio Gramsci, who really theorized the concept of crisis. According to Gramsci and the scholarship that has been developed especially in the Global South, the “crisis” is a horizon of opportunities. Within the European Union, this has proven  true: after Russia invaded Ukraine, the EU accession process was sped up to have Ukraine and Moldova part of the European Union as soon as possible. If I need to criticise this kind of approach, I would question why it wasn’t the case for the Western Balkans, whose citizens started to see some double standards. Why wasn’t it possible to catch the momentum and bring also the Western Balkans, along with Ukraine and Moldova and also Georgia, into the EU? It could have been a great opportunity not only for the peripheries, but also for the EU, which could have shown capability to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Right now, it seems that, within the EU, “all peripheries are equal, but some peripheries are more equal than others”. Thank you so much [for listening], and I’m looking forward to joining the discussion.

Taru Haapala:

Thank you Francesco for those wonderfully provocative remarks. I’m sure that will get the discussion going, but first I’m going to hand it back to our editors who will respond briefly to the critics, so Ali and Miruna, would you like to respond?

Radu Cucută:

I would like to thank Helsinki University Press for the efforts they have made to publish this book. I would also like to thank the two speakers for their words of appreciation regarding our work. I’m really humbled by some of the things I’ve heard here with regard to the idea of looking at the structures that underpin this process. 

We didn’t ignore them. The thing is that, at first sight, our instincts or the interactions that we had seem to be somewhat contradictory, because normally when we talk about euroscepticism, we might talk about populist actors trying to politically cash in on the benefits that are being offered by a growing number of people who, because of the nature of contemporary capitalism, seem to be the losers of the integration process. But the ambivalence that you mentioned and the ambivalence that we encountered was that we have this kind of euroscepticism, populist actors who are trying to cash in to take advantage of, let’s say, the losers of the integration process, but the ambivalence that I’m talking about here is the particular case of Romania. In this case, the ambivalence and the pragmatic eurosepticism that is expressed in public debates in media literary circles is not the ambivalence of the losers of the integration process or of the losers. It’s a kind of ambivalence of, let’s say, the middle class, which is most connected to the European processes and which benefits most from the way capitalism works in Romania. That was the impression we got from the interviews. It’s as if they don’t criticise the European project. The European project is good in itself, and the benefits for Romania as a society or as a country. The problem is that we don’t assert ourselves more. 

There is another aspect that Veronika Salminen highlighted and we thought about it. We initially thought about writing part of the material starting from the concept of liminality, because what we thought was going to differentiate Romania and Bulgaria was this position of not being a full member of the EU, and this position becomes ontologically in itself a completely different category of in-between. But in a sense we had to not necessarily negotiate, but look at the positions and try to find a middle ground methodologically and theoretically with all the other writers, with all the other people who contributed to the book and who speak from a different perspective and look at societies from a different perspective. 

I would argue that there is something to be said about the liminality of the EU integration process and to link it to what Mr Trupia said earlier. Yes, this liminality takes many forms in the Western Balkans, in particular being in-between is probably the permanence of being in-between. I would argue that the Western Balkans itself is a category of liminality. Anyone who tries to put a permanent label on something and to make order out of something that is residual or in between different categories has something to say about liminality and it should definitely be explored. I would argue that we have not been able to do that for very practical reasons. That is my contribution. Thank you again, and thank you to all the participants who logged on to discuss with us.

Ali Onur Özçelik:

I will make some more comments as well. Thank you Veronika and Francesco. You are amazing critics. 

I just made some notes. But maybe I won’t be able to answer all of them. First of all, yes, this is kind of trying to do a multidisciplinary approach and that always brings some problems and you’re right that this is kind of like a construct, a post-structuralist. We are trying to put different things together. When we say this reconfiguring of EU peripheries, we’re actually trying to show that these peripheral regions have some kind of meaning-making agency, which means that they’re constructing identities in a way that challenges these conventional centre-periphery models, which means that this model actually or what we’re arguing that this shows that the European Union is not just a single cohesive centre but it’s something that’s evolving. Because the periphery is evolving and the core is evolving, so basically they’re all interdependent. It creates a kind of interdependence between them, where the peripheries have the potential to influence and define or perhaps redefine the core. 

Maybe we can just say that yes, the periphery can talk, as you say, like a subaltern. The periphery can talk, so this is actually a kind of alternative perspective on the EU integration process, which also offers some valuable insights into European and global economic politics, and can also emphasise that peripherality is not fixed, but is shaped by these complexities and shifting relationships between these regions within and across borders. This is my intervention. It’s short, but this is my intervention.

David Aprasidze, Georgia

I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to our project. I love to see these familiar faces and I hope that we will have the opportunity to meet again. To Helsinki University Press – it was really amazing to work with you, because it was really very supportive. There was a lot of support from your side and I really enjoyed it. 

As for the book, uh and, um, well, um, I don’t know, fortunately or unfortunately, what’s happening now in Georgia reminds us that books like this need to be published and publicised. Today I had a chance, just before I prepared for this meeting, I just leafed through some of the text and actually what are the main findings or the main ideas presented here and some of them were discussed critically or positively during our meeting today. These ideas are currently taking place in my country. 

Of course we don’t have enough time to discuss all the details of what is going on in Georgia at the moment, but coming back to the book, I think one of the advantages, and it has been mentioned many times, is that we are the authors who come from this periphery, from these regions, and we also have a diversity of methodological and scientific approach. I would say that this structuralism somehow also enables us not to be afraid of this diversity but also to bring in different, well you know there are different perspectives and yet somehow to make an important contribution to the academic and hopefully not only academic but also practical side of policy. 

Geopolitics has been mentioned many times. What’s happening in Ukraine, and Miruna also referred to our friends, our colleagues from Ukraine, has many flavours. It has many faces and what’s happening in Georgia at the moment is also geopolitics without war, but it’s a consequence. Thank you very much again, it has been a great pleasure to take part in this discussion and I hope that we will have another opportunity to return to this and other topics.

Bașak Alpan:

If I could just intervene. Very nice to meet you. Very nice to see old friends and probably new ones. Thank you very much. As the project coordinator of LEAP, when I was designing this project, I always had the concern whether this project, which is linked to Europe at the periphery, would reproduce the peripheralisation of the periphery or whether it would contribute to the discussion. Here I could see that there is an added value in bringing back this old core-periphery discussion. So thank you very much. And the lectures of Francesco and Veronika were very inspiring. Thank you very much. Perhaps I could, um, invite the speakers as well as the participants here to think more not about the periphery but about the elites. Because this book is mainly about the elite perspective. So I was just wondering and maybe this would be some food for thought.

Is there any value in thinking about the connection between the periphery and the elites? Do the elites contribute to this peripheralisation or do they become part of this power structure because the other book that is coming out of our project is about the youth perspective, which I think will be out in December. The youth in the periphery of Europe are basically linked to European integration, so it would be very striking to compare these elite perspectives and the perspectives of the young population. Does thinking about the elite in terms of the periphery make our discussion better or does it somehow contribute to this power structure that we’re talking about? So I might ask the speakers or the participants here to think about the elite rather than the periphery. Maybe it will make us think about how this power structure is a challenge.

Thank you very much and, as you know, thank you very much to the speakers and to Helsinki University Press. 

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