The idea of Europe
Within the current context of political disaffection and the public’s alienation from the European idea, we look at what the authors who have visited the CCCB said about the principles and values on which we can try to rebuild the meaning of the European project.
Enzo Traverso
Europe, laboratory of ideas
The twentieth century often appears in shared memory as one of the most violent periods in the history of Europe, but its intellectual and political legacy also contains a host of voices that have expanded the frontiers of thought in the quest for justice and emancipation. The historian Enzo ...
Lea Ypi: “My idea of freedom is a moral idea”
Lea Ypi was eleven years old when her country, Albania, began to transition from communism to a liberal democratic system. With the fall of the regime, the idea of having grown up in a free country also evaporated, while at the same time she realised that the freedom of capitalism was another ...
Olivette Otele and Blanca Garcés
New and old frontiers
Free circulation of people of the European Union has enabled the emergence of a space shared by citizens, but it has also drawn excluding limits for those who remain outside. The historian Olivette Otele and the political scientist Blanca Garcés speak about the cultural and political ...
Zygmunt Bauman
New Borders and Universal Values
What sort of differences are becoming important because of the borders we are drawing today? Bauman talks about our obsession with borders, and exemplifies it with the problems in the city, since the city is a big laboratory of experiments in cohabitation, human understanding and dialogue
Jorge Semprún
Thinking Europe
Writer and thinker Jorge Semprún inaugurated the “Thinking Europe” cycle in 2006 with a conference on the shared principles and cultural-humanistic values on which the European idea was built.
Herta Müller
Language as Homeland
The Romanian writer Herta Müller talks with the translator and literary critic Cecilia Dreymüller. Herta Müller’s work as a poet and fiction writer was recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.
Pedro Olalla
Democracy's Old Future
Europe is ageing demographically. Is it also ageing politically? Ideologically? Is democracy, as an in fieri project, compatible with a form of social ageing believed by many to be synonymous with conservatism, dependency and abdication? Are these really attributes of ageing? ...
Timothy Garton Ash
Thinking Europe. Liberty and diversity
In this conference, British journalist and historian Timothy Garton Ash reflects on Europe’s growing cultural diversity.
Svetlana Alexievich
The Voices of Europe
Svetlana Alexievich speaks about the future we can imagine for Europe from a perspective forged in the east of the continent and permeated by the polyphonic chorus of witnesses who have populated her long career as a journalist and writer.
Eric Hobsbawm, Donald Sassoon and Josep Fontana
Thinking Europe
Two of the most influential historians of the second half of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm and Donald Sassoon, discuss the European idea in a debate moderated by Josep Fontana.
Axel Honneth
Wield the Word. Freedom
Axel Honneth is a philosopher and sociologist. A former assistant to Jürgen Habermas, he is presently deemed to be the most eminent figure of the so-called third generation of the Frankfurt School. His work is concerned with the problem of the struggle of the least prvileged groups for ...
Seyla Benhabib
Wield the Word. Citizenship
Seyla Benhabib is a leading philosopher specialising in European social and political thought, feminist theory and the history of modern political theory. She is one of the most authoritative voices in the philosophical debate on difference. In this lecture she reflects on the instability of ...
Ulrich Beck
In common. Europa
German sociologist Ulrich Beck, one of the most renowned theorists on the consequences of modernisation and globalisation, opened the “In Common” cycle of debates. In this cycle, thinkers reflected on aspects of the common good, such as nature, education, democratic ideals and even ...
Masha Gessen
Imagination and Democracy
In the framework of the Orwell Day, the journalist Masha Gessen defends imagination as a necessary tool for reviving the ideal of democracy and countering the assaults of totalitarianism.
Anne Applebaum
Does Eastern Europe Still Exist?
Anne Applebaum discuss why the nations of the region we called "Eastern Europe" have become very different.
Étienne Balibar
Europe, final crisis?
Étienne Balibar is a European philosopher who has worked most on issues of nationality, migration and the state sovereignty crisis. This disciple of Louis Althusser, with whom he wrote the classic Reading Capital, and militant of the French Communist Party for two decades (1961-1981), ...
Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Saiba Bayo
Thinking the World from Africa
The philosopher Souleyman Bachir Diagne, lecturer at Columbia University and one of the most outstanding voices in contemporary African philosophy, speaks with the political scientist Saiba Bayo about the global crisis we are presently experiencing.