For the last two decades, the European Union has been faced with unprecedented political challenges. The uninhibited assertion of “illiberal” politics, in the name of national values considered different from the “liberal values of the West,” and the contestation of fundamental democratic principles has been constructed by its promoters as an expression of defense of national specificities. These developments have been explicitly formulated in resistance to cultural and political norms considered exogenous and hegemonic, justifying thereby a political agenda of restriction of freedoms and control of institutions. As a result, two opposing camps have been conveniently portrayed: “liberal democracies” and “illiberal regimes.” The East/West binary that underlies this discourse and the political responses to it, gives this crisis of confidence between European states a geopolitical and territorial dimension. It reiterates an old distribution of roles: East Central and Southeast European countries are suspected by the Western states of being politically and socially and lacking democratic traditions; in return, the “West” is accused of wanting to give lessons and of being primarily interested in imposing its domination.

However, in the West as in the East, comparable forms of polarization of public opinions are observable. All over Europe we see a growing divergence between the votes of “cosmopolitan” metropolises and those of rural areas or small towns, which claim to defend traditional national values. The conflict orbits around the social and institutional histories as well as the political imaginations and languages of its protagonists; it is also the result of the strategies of political movements and their actors, situated at different levels of power, who exploit these symbolic and actual divisions. Therefore, in order to get out of the antagonism and make the European democratic project more resilient, the project aims at going beyond binary narratives of the East-West-divide by investigating and situating the underlying reasons of these dichotomous perceptions and role patterns, both with regard to ideological representations and actual experiences. This is all the more relevant as the last decades saw a general drive toward the „transnationalization“ of different political movements from the antiglobalist left through the social democrats, liberal reformists all the way to the radical rightist „identitarians.“

Abandoning the strictly national frameworks in the study of contestations of liberal democracy, we adopt an actor- and network-centered perspective on different spatial levels: from the international level of the circulation of ideas and their speakers, to the national and local levels of militant mobilization or political affiliation. We are interested in the social fields in which different types of actors (including political, legal, academic, societal or economic stakeholders) interact and which they configure, and in the justifications they mobilize to account for their actions, as well as the multiple exchanges taking place among them. In order to understand these processes, we also seek to investigate how the transnational interaction of political, legal and scientific actors was/is constitutive of the creation or reproduction of an East-West dichotomy, and how we can go beyond it.

From this perspective, we seek to shed new light on the interplay of the national political infrastructure and the transnational transfers of ideology, organizational knowhow, and mobilizing strategies. From this vantage point, our project intends to reveal the multi-dimensional aspects of political movements in Europe. The complexity of the processes at work requires a multidisciplinary and multi-layer perspective, combining historical, sociological, and ethnographic methods.

We identified four different research directions, reflecting the principal spheres of encounter:

• Transnational Rule-of-Law Activism (hosted at the Institute of Political Science at Leipzig University, Leipzig/ Germany)
  The first stream deals with transnational rule-of-law activism by scrutinizing the interplay of East Central Europe activists with their Western peers in the establishment of an EU-wide understanding of rule of law. Liberal constitutional states are based on higher order of political norms where values, institutions, and procedures are beyond the immediate reach of temporary electoral majorities. They represent either a priori rules of a political regime (i.e. Germany’s “eternity clause”) or a framework that can be revised under quasi-consensual, deliberative procedures.
• Transnationalization of IIliberal Movements (hosted at CEU-Democracy Institute, Budapest/ Hungary)The second stream focuses on the transnational connectivities of right-wing contenders of liberal democracy, looking at the circulation of ideas as well as the networks that transmit them. While the usual representation of ideological interaction shaping East Central European political thought is one-directional (West-East), this component of our project sheds light on much more complex entanglements and an inherent multi-directionality of ideological transfer.
• Leftist Connectivities – Swimming Against the Stream? (hosted at New Europe College NEC, Bucharest/ Romania)
  The third direction focuses on the political and intellectual connectivities of the “new left.” All over Europe, the leftist political imaginaries are increasingly squeezed by the polar opposition between liberal centre and right-wing populism that is reshaping much of the political and ideological landscape. In this project, we leave aside the established centre-left parties and organizations but focus on the anti-systemic leftist ideologies and practices. Here no East-Central European exceptionalism is assumed, but rather a European-wide crisis of the left and a search for new political ideas and frameworks of mobilization.
• Between Normalization and Exoticism: Academic Transfers and Social Agency (hosted at Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin/ Germany)
  In this stream we intend to look at the multi-layered dialogue of Western and Eastern European academic cultures with a special focus on the way Eastern Europe (and the Balkans) have been framed in the last two decades in relation to the Western European system of references.