Modernization, Memory, and War from Southern Europe to the Eastern Neighbourhood

Organized by the Faculty of Political Science, SNSPA (Bucharest), in partnership with the Centre d'Etude de la Vie Politique CEVIPOL (Brussels) and the Department of Political Sciences (DiSP) University of Naples Federico II.

This conference proposes a renewed reflection on contemporary political dynamics across an enlarging European space, bringing into a single comparative frame three groups of states that are usually studied apart: long-standing and more recent EU member states in Central and Southern Europe, including Croatia, the Union’s most recent member, alongside earlier twenty-first-century entrants such as Slovenia; the Western Balkans, engaged in protracted and uneven accession processes; and the Eastern Neighbourhood, where Moldova and Ukraine have entered the enlargement agenda not through gradual convergence but as a direct consequence of war. The aim is to examine how political cleavages are being transformed across these regions, and what these transformations imply for democratic trajectories and for the European integration project itself.

Across these societies, a particularly strong dialectic can be observed between a relationship to the past that is often idealized and structured around historical, identity-based, and cultural references, and aspirations toward modernization, economic development, and European integration. This cleavage, reflecting a tension between traditional anchoring and future-oriented projection, appears to constitute a central political driver, fueled by dissatisfaction with the present and uncertainty about the future. Yet how this tension plays out cannot be separated from where a society stands in relation to Europe: whether integration is a settled fact, a contested horizon, or a wartime necessity.

The conference is organized around an enlargement axis that distinguishes three political temporalities rather than treating accession as a single threshold. In states that joined earlier, including the Central European members where illiberal turns have reshaped party competition, integration has not dissolved the past/future cleavage but recomposed it, often after accession rather than before. In the Western Balkans, accession remains a deferred horizon, entangled with post-conflict dynamics, clientelism, and unfinished state-building. In Moldova and Ukraine, candidacy is the product of geopolitical urgency, lending the relationship between past and future an existential charge that the accession of Slovenia or Croatia did not carry. Reading these three temporalities together allows us to ask whether they represent stages of a single trajectory or genuinely divergent paths.

A second axis runs across all of these cases and has become impossible to set aside: the cleavage produced by war. Two distinct phenomena should be held apart. There is a geopolitical East–West cleavage — Euro-Atlantic orientation set against pro-Russian, neutralist, or sovereigntist positions — that cuts through every society under discussion, including long-standing members such as Hungary and Slovakia. And there is the direct Russia–Ukraine confrontation, which is not merely an axis of opinion but an actual front line that redefines political identity across the whole space. War, in this sense, does not map neatly onto the GAL–TAN template: it short-circuits it. Where the founding cleavage of a polity has become a matter of national survival, the categories developed to describe peacetime realignments in Western Europe may capture only the surface.

This raises the conference’s guiding question. The GAL–TAN framework (Green/Alternative/Libertarian versus Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist) has renewed the analysis of political realignments in Western Europe, but its applicability to Central Europe, Southern Europe, the Balkans, and the Eastern Neighbourhood remains open. Are we witnessing the diffusion of these cleavages, their hybridization with other logics — post-conflict dynamics, clientelism, state-building, geopolitical alignment — or the emergence of configurations that escape existing typologies altogether? The wager of the conference is that the most interesting answers lie in the interaction of three overlapping layers of cleavage: a classic socioeconomic axis, the GAL–TAN cultural axis, and a geopolitical axis sharpened by war. Approaching this interaction through the institutions that channel or distort it — institutions of accession, of the state, and of collective memory — may prove more revealing than treating cleavages as matters of attitude alone.

Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The reconfiguration of political cleavages across Central Europe, Southern Europe, the Western Balkans, and the Eastern Neighbourhood.

• The relevance and limits of the GAL–TAN model in semi-peripheral, post-accession, and wartime contexts.

• Enlargement as a political temporality: comparing pre-accession, post-accession, and geopolitically driven candidacies (Slovenia and Croatia, the Western Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine).

• The geopolitical East–West cleavage and its penetration of domestic party systems, including in long-standing member states.

• War as a producer of cleavage: the Russia–Ukraine front line and its effects on political identity and mobilization.

• Relationships to the past, collective memory, and the political uses of history.

• European integration dynamics and the transformation of political systems.

• Populism, nationalism, sovereigntism, and contemporary forms of political mobilization.

• Comparisons between member states, candidate states, and states whose candidacy is a product of war.

Important dates:

• Abstract deadline: 15 September 2026

• Acceptance notification: 1 October 2026

• Conference: 5–8 November 2026, Bucharest, Romania