Conference ‘The Idea of Europe’

ResPublica Director Phillip Blond is one of the keynote speakers at the forthcoming conference on "The Idea of Europe"

The conference on “The Idea of Europe” is organised by the independent journal Telos — a leading publication that brings together intellectuals from around the world, especially North America and Europe. The conference will take place in L’Aquila, Italy, on 5-8 September 2014.

Amid the war in eastern Ukraine and growing uncertainty within the EU, the question of Europe has once again come to the fore. Since 1945, integration has retrieved and extended the ancient Carolingian unity of France and Germany in the west of Europe. But successive waves of EU enlargement have failed to restore and renew the Constantinian vision of a pan-European polity that includes Russia, Ukraine and Turkey — former empires that emerged from Byzantium and that view themselves as European powers.

How can we rethink relations across Europe and also between Europe, the rest of the West and the wider world? Can we speak of a global Europe without a leading role for Britain and Russia — however unlikely such a scenario currently may be?

Such and similar questions will be addressed in the form of plenary panel debates and individual presentations. Among the confirmed speakers are Russell Berman (Stanford), Phillip Blond (ResPublica), Christopher Coker (LSE),Tim Luke (Virginia Tech), David Pan (University of California, Irvine), Luciano Pellicani (Rome), Nicholas Rengger (St. Andrews) and Richard Sakwa (Kent).

There are still places left to attend the conference, give a presentation or participate in one of the plenary panels. The deadline for registration has been extended until Wednesday 14th August: telosinstitute.net/laquilaconference.

For further information, please email Dr Adrian Pabst, Associate Editor of Telos, A.Pabst@kent.ac.uk.