Globalizing Europe - Non-European Perceptions of Europe

The fifth RICHIE Conference 2012 explores images, ideas, and perceptions of Europe from a global perspective after 1945. Europe has been, is, and will always be a project that defines itself in contrast to the perceived non-European world. The conference seeks to complement the debate on European identity by non-European perspectives on and constructions of Europe.
The conference aims are three-fold:
First, it paves the way to locate Europe in a global context and overhauls both national paradigms and euro-centric perspectives. While global history often seeks to highlight socio-economic phenomena this conference pursues a global intellectual history of Europe.
Second, the conference highlights different national and transnational actors and their varying and ambivalent concepts of Europe. The conference, thus, aims to relocate Europe on a global mental map, thereby contributing to the ongoing historiographical debate about "Provincializing Europe".
Lastly, it scrutinizes multiple influences and entanglements between Europe and non-European actors. The conference will trace and discuss global images, ideas, and perspectives from five different, albeit connected angles:

• Competitive perspective: Struggling with the European model
  Europe in a global perspective is often characterized by the development of welfare states, a certain social permeability, an ongoing process of secularization, and the political and economical integration of nation states within transnational institutions. This first panel seeks to shed light on the empathic, critical, and disapproving global perspectives on Europe from nation-states, transnational actors that include both governmental and non-governmental organizations worldwide.
• Postcolonial perspective: Europe seen by its former colonies
  The varying experiences of foreign rule, and the continuing economic entanglements, left their deep marks on both the relation between former empire and periphery and the perspective of the postcolonial world on Europe. This panel will discuss this unique perspective on Europe from the post-colonial world.
• Migration perspective
  This third panel seeks to trace the perspectives on Europe from both European emigrants in non-European countries and non-European immigrants inside Europe. The panel will especially focus on the complex interdependencies of origin and destination that shaped the perspectives on Europe.
• European identity and European integration
  Since 1952, the process of institutionalization has been accompanied by complementary procedures of inclusion and exclusion of European states. This fourth panel will investigate the perception of the integration process from the perspective of the non-integrated, excluded European states. Frequently included into institutionalized Europe over time, the changing perspectives from nations of both democratic and authoritarian European areas on the integration process shall be examined.
• Europe and the global politics of memory
  The European history of the 20th century has been marked by eruptions of violence and mass murder, struggles for freedom, processes of democratization and trans-nationalization. This last panel aims to shed light on the worldwide politics of memory and instrumentalizations of Europe's 20th century history. More specifically, it will interrogate how different actors worldwide perceive, memorialize, and make specific use of European historical phenomena and events like the Holocaust, Soviet crimes, the cold War, the European integration, and the downfall of Communism.

Information:
http://www.hum.leiden.edu