This episode explores recent challenges to the ideal of the university as a space for open debate and the plurality of views. What is emerging in various national contexts of higher education across Europe and in the United States? And how is the ideal of the university currently being debated? Listen also to hear what the EU’s rearmament could mean for academic freedom across Europe.
Our guest: Luiza Anna Bialasiewicz
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, rector and president of Central European University, Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This is the ninth episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. I'm very pleased to welcome today Luiza Bialasiewicz, professor of Political and Economic Geography at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy, where she's also director of the School for International Education. Before moving to Venice last year for over a decade, Louisa was a professor and chair of European Governance at the University of Amsterdam, where she also directed the Amsterdam Center. She's held several prestigious fellowships and visiting positions at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the University of British Columbia, and Osaka City University. She holds many advisory positions among others at the Robert Schumann Center for Advanced Studies at the EUI in Florence, the International Institute for Peace in Vienna, the International Advisory Committee for Strategy and Security Policy of the Austrian Armed Forces, the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome, and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Her most recent publications include an article, “Geographical Storylines and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Narrative Power and Narrative Taboos, a Difficult Conversation”[i] published last yearand “The Social and Spatial Forms of the Far Right Across Europe”[ii] in 2020, the co-edited volume “Spaces of Tolerance, Changing Geographies and Philosophies of Religion in Today's Europe”[iii] and “Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Making of European Space”[iv].
Louisa joins me today for a conversation with a dual focus as a fellow professor and university administrator, she shares my own preoccupation with the dilemmas of academic freedom in our institutions today. So we first discuss recent challenges to the ideal of the university as a space for open debate, rational discussion, and of course, the acceptance of a plurality of views, drawing on her familiarity with various national contexts of higher education, both across Europe and in the United States, I'll ask her to reflect on how and why this ideal of the university may have changed and is being challenged and how it defers today in different contexts across the world. We will then turn to a discussion about the imperatives of the European Union's rearmament means for academic institutions and academic freedom across Europe.
The ideal of cosmopolitan peace seems unrealistic in the face of decisions by European governments to invest heavily in arms production and security. This has led to divisive geopolitical debates within the walls of many universities. Can academics afford to stay on the sidelines and reject any kind of involvement in this epic shift in defense insecurity policies and priorities? What are the pitfalls, however, of such an involvement, which must find a delicate balance between critical analysis and the potential of instrumental co-optation?
How and with whom could universities engage in this difficult but urgent conversation about the looming threat of war in Europe once again, and the need to bolster defensive capabilities? How would such an engagement then impact research funding? All of this also invites reflections on the implications of defense insecurity more broadly in our age marked by what a previous guest of mine on this podcast, Mary Kaldor[v], has called “Forever Wars” - wars that never formally begin or even end. I will ask Luiza to comment on the tradeoff between a war economy and spending of social welfare in European countries, and on the time, pressures exerted by these momentous shifts that we are witnessing, which could precipitate flawed decisions and policies. It's in these contested areas, among which we could also include the contradictions between re-arming and climate mitigation. The universities will be under pressure to adopt difficult positions in the coming years.
Luiza, welcome to the podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you as my guest today and thanks very much for making the time for joining me for the conversation.
Luiza Bialasiewicz (LB): Thank you so much Shalini, for this invitation, both to be able to take part in the podcast, but also I guess to share my own preoccupations, which are many on exactly these subjects, and share them with you, share them with the listeners, and think about where we can go next.
SR: So, let's begin our discussion, Luiza, of geopolitical entanglements of universities by talking about the transformation of the very idea of the university as a space of free and rational debate, the ideals of academic freedom have come under attack from many quarters. These attacks are intimately connected to the backlash against liberal democracy on the whole, as several guests on this podcast have pointed out earlier.
However, the external attacks on academic freedom are also compounded by internal contestation within our institutions. Ideally, universities should be open spaces for tolerant and civil engagement with a plurality of views, but they're increasingly becoming yet another site of canceling, censoring, curtailing free debate. Disagreement has become disagreeable, and the right to dissent is being replaced by the narcissism of small differences. You are familiar with several national contexts of higher education across Europe and in the us. Could you begin by reflecting on some recent changes at universities that you have observed in these different national contexts, and how much is this fraught situation due to the disruption caused by the COVID pandemic?
LB: Thanks so much for that. As you mentioned, I grew up academically in the U.S. and I still have very close ties there. So, it's really hard not to place these comments first in that context, which, as you and listeners will be very well aware, is really under full scale attacks.
So, from withdrawal of funding and complete uncertainty on what comes next, but also direct censorship, the famous list of terms that, if I think about my own work, I wouldn't be able to write an article without. As a geographer, I can tell you what's happening in geography departments that also include physical geography colleagues, those doing environmental studies and climate science. And there, the hammer has already fallen, blocked all grants, departments are shutting down graduate admissions entirely. And I don't think many Europeans realize the scale of what is occurring there. But I think that makes ensuring academic freedom even more important in Europe and elsewhere. And here too, we're under attack, I mean both financially and ideologically. So today in Amsterdam, colleagues at my former institution are on striketo protest cuts to the higher education budget that are staggering.
We're talking about anywhere from 500 million euros to a billion euros being cut over the next years. That has already led Dutch universities to block research support, withdraw grants that had already been promised, announced cuts to positions and actually announced cuts to entire departments.
So, in the humanities and language departments, which have been the hardest cut, University of Leiden tried to shut down its Italian studies department deemed a luxury language by the ministry as if there is such a thing. Thankfully they halted that after an outcry, but it's basically just blocked until 2026.
In Italy where I am currently, the Meloni government has also operated very significant cuts to university budgets over 200 million euros already for the current year. So, you can imagine what that has done to universities’ planning abilities. And even though they have not set universities in their sights so far, as in the source of content moderation to put it lightly, attemptthat we are seeing in the United States, they have started already revising school curricula in a fashion that is really, really alarming.
But the government here in Italy is trying to exert its power over universities in other ways. There's a new security decree, for example, that limits not only the right to protest on campuses, but now requires all universities, university administrations to collaborate with state security services and furnish information on what is happening on campuses.
If we go back to the Netherlands, which I left after over a decade, even before the current [events], I would certainly deem that when the Far-Right coalition came to power ,there was already a very important backlash against internationals. Both a return to teaching exclusively and Dutch, but also calls to really rethink what universities are for and who they should serve.
All of these things need to bethought of together. So, there's both a financial attack, but there's also an attack as you were mentioning what can be done in terms of research at universities. And what is university's purpose and this kind of re-nationalization that we are seeing, I mean the United States is really, in this moment, the extreme example. But this is happening in various European contexts and I cancertainly speak about the Dutch and the Italian ones where certainly in the Netherlands after years of hard push for internationalization, we're seeinga reversal of those policies also in very violent fashion with internationals being blamed for everything from exorbitant housing costs in cities like Amsterdam to the loss of Dutch culture.
SR: So let me pick up two points which you've just made Luiza, because what you are describing is not just a climate that is hostile to universities and therefore university autonomy, academic freedom, but universities seem to share this kind of polarization of views and growing intolerance within societies at large in which they're operating, so that engaging in dialogue with those whom we disagree with, with those views which we seem to find offensive is becoming increasingly difficult, not only in our societies, but also within universities. Social media, of course, adds to this a vicious circle of mutual hostility and suspicion. You have been feeling increasingly frustrated by the impossibility of engaging with fundamental geopolitical questions in your university without backlash and without censorship as rigid dividing lines foreclose open debate.
We've seen that on wars, especially the Gaza War. We have seen that with regard to COVID to begin with the question of lockdowns. But you've been preoccupied of late with strategic dilemmas that may well prove critical for the very survival of democracy in Europe caught between the Russian War of aggression on its eastern borders, and the unraveling of its former transatlantic security guarantees through the U.S. The European Union is now embarking on re-arming itself. Leaders are certainly openly talking about the urgent need to invest billions into the overhaul of defensive and military capacities and you worry that instead of hosting and joining these difficult conversations, many universities are tempted to avoid participation in these public debates altogether, citing their commitment to peace in a world torn apart by authoritarian drift and democratic backsliding.
How should European academic institutions and academics respond to these challenges that will necessarily involve them in military research? Because most European countries are going to put more and more of their budgets into research for and with the military, something that U.S. universities have been engaged in since decades.
LB: The big issue for me is that we come to this moment of reckoning, if we want to call it that with baggage of the past years that already made the situation fraught. And I want to go back to something that you said at the very beginning regarding the break that occurs already during the COVID pandemic because the retreat from dialogue, these dividing lines emerge already then, and they're dividing lines that in a sense have never healed. And even if we look just at what we can broadly call the critical academic left, those lines emerged precisely during the pandemic. Whether it's considering the proper desired role of the state, of state power, but also notions of solidarity. We can cite various figures, whether it's somebody like Giorgio Agamben, who to my mind at least managed to disgrace himself during the pandemic years with his quite extreme pronouncements. But also, as I said, divisions that emerge even among those of us who considered ourselves more or less on the same side. And I was really struck by those divides already then, and started digging into the kind of conspiratorial imaginings also present in academia that emerged in 2020, ‘21 and after.
And conspiracies are important things to take seriously as variousanthropologists keep reminding us. There was a wonderful lecture given by Didier Fassin in Vienna, actually I think it was the Eric Wolf lecture he gave in 2019 called “Of Plots and Men”, where he talked about precisely this: why we need to take conspiracy theories seriously, because as he said, they are battles over meaning, they are, in a sense, indexes of social relations. They tell us something about the ways in which people, including critical academics, try to make sense of a world out of control. How do we try to make sense of these changes, including big geopolitical shifts happening around us? How do we identify the good guys, the bad guys? Who is to blame and what is to be done? And so, if the pandemic operates that break and creates these dividing lines, also within the academic left, the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine brings another similar world-changing shock.
And with it, is also a new set of conspiratorial imaginaries. I can speak about the Italian context where these connections were very, very visible from signs on walls here in the Northeast. So, Venice, Trieste, the Italian slogan was “Guerra e pandemia – stessa strategia”. So, war and the pandemic are the same strategy of European elites to enforce control.
Another popular slogan wasNATO cares about peace as much as Pfizer cares about your health. So, you know, kind of drawing these parallels. And then of course, I mean, and this is something that colleagues have worked on extensively, the groups that supported the anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine movement, are now directly opposing any military aid to Ukraine funded by Russian disinformation, in the Italian case, also directly funded by Russian money.
But these dividing lines go beyond fear. And they exist and have remained also within universities. So, the breaks were already there. And then we have the horrific attacks of Hamas of October 7th. We have the brutal war on Gaza, and that adds another layer. And I don't want to fold these events together, but in terms of the possibility of dialogue with those on the opposing side, because this is where we have come to, they are cumulative, and we need to think of them as cumulative.
So, the fact that now we speak of sides that discussions also within universities, also within the critical left, have become precisely about choosing sides and in the football sense, not in the political philosophical sense. I have to say that in 30 years of teaching, I started in ‘93, I have seen nothing like this. The inability to engage in dialogue more with colleagues than with students. And I think, so when we come to the present moment, when we are faced with the authoritarianism of Trump on one side and Putin on the other, and the EU trying to somehow formulate a response and then, you know, we can talk about what that response should be, I feel that we as European academics are no longer able to have a conversation with those who are on this other side.
SR: So, in your own work as a critical geographer, Luiza, you've dealt with problems of geopolitics since many years, and you've made several important interventions. In earlier debates, you warned against the uncritical adoption of certain geopolitical metaphors and imaginaries, which underpin the European Union's narratives many years ago.
But things seem to have changed now with the threat of war that looms over the political discourse in Europe, and despite your misgivings about being co-opted to legitimize official European Union positions or official national government positions, you strongly advocate that universities should not shy away from talking about war, security, and defense. Could you say something about the kinds of conversations that you would like to have happen, the kinds of conversations and dialogues that are missing, but that you would envision and with whom?
LB: Thank you for this because as you've mentioned as a political geographer, coming from a discipline that was literally disgraced following the Second World War, and I'll mention this because I think most listeners will not be aware of this, following the second World War geography departments were shut down at all U.S. Ivy League universities and seen very much as complicit with Nazism, complicit with fascism as it was. And political geographers were very important voices, not just in providing strategic expertise, but in providing the sort of geopolitical, geographical imaginations that made these projects possible.
I and other geographers have been very wary of this rediscovery of the “G-word” - geopolitics - that has been operated most recently by European leaders. And I've done my best to take them to task on it. Whether it was people like Josep Borrell and his very problematic metaphors of the jungle and the garden, the European garden that should protect itself from the jungle beyond.
But also, being enamourment withthis idea that Europe should become geopolitical, whatever that term would mean. And I think taking on this term and the imaginations associated with it, uncritically is very worrisome and very dangerous, as to is this idea that somehow the EU needs to wake up, grow up, man up. Because there are some very interesting, also kind of gendered metaphors bound up with this. Or as you know, Emmanuel Macron said that most recently that we can no longer be simply herbivores. I mean, all of these metaphors are very problematic, and they imply a sole path. So first we need to recognize that the world is dangerous. And in this dangerous world, the EU can be only one kind of power, hard military power, which it has not been so far. Now as much as we can, and indeed we should, it is our role to unpack and criticize these imaginaries and especially this notion of no choice, this notion that the world is dangerous and we can only respond in one fashion.
We do need to recognize that the world has changed, and we do need to rethink both the European project, what it is, what it is for, and also we do need to formulate new geographical, geopolitical imaginaries, because if we do not, others certainly will. We need to think about what it is that European institutions need to do to protect our democratic rights and to protect what is left of our social welfare systems, which is not a small thing, which also means yes, rethinking what security and what insecurity mean today. What are the risks facing the EU, facing EU citizens? And these are not, of course, only military risks. They're also energy shocks, price shocks, but also the attack on our fundamental rights that are now being waged on two fronts. I already mentioned the role of Russian disinformation and also funding flows in feeding the Far-Right and other movements.
These are now attacks coming from the U.S., very explicitly because those networks had already been operating previously. If we look at the role of various U.S. groups feeding Far-Right movements through funding as well as ideological support previously, I mean, this is nothing new. But now we have U.S. leaders stating that explicitly. At the same time, apart fromdefending, I don't want to use the “V-word”, values,which is very problematic I think, but defending what the EU has been able to build as a project, I think we also need to think about how we as Europeans can help defend the rights of others. And listeners may entirely disagree with me here, but I believe that we have an obligation to support those who appeal to Europe's promise, whether in Ukraine, in Moldova, in Georgia, or in Palestine. And not just because of some updated domino theory scenario that if we don't defend Ukraine, we are next, or in any sort of neo-colonial vision of the spread of European values or anything like that. But I do think we need to think and talk about what a renewed understanding of the European project means. And this conversation is far too important to ignore or to sideline. And certainly, far too important to be left just to defend analysts and politicians.
SR: So, let me ask you something Luiza, which intrigued me about your term geopolitical imaginaries. One of the geopolitical imaginaries, which Putin seems to operate in which his intellectual mentor Dugin, seems to be harping on, is the idea of Eurasia, the idea that they are pedaling as sort of different geopolitical, geographical imaginary to the European Union.
And with Trump cozying up to Putin, this suddenly takes on a very, very different kind of power than it had before. We could have ignored it as you know just maverick rethinking of the world that we were living in until about, say, three months ago. But given the way the Trump-Putin alliance seems to be developing maybe we should be taking this seriously as a geopolitical imaginary.
LB: It is not a new imaginary and Dugin and Putin draw directly on the work of classical geopoliticians like Halford MacKinder and others who imagined the Eurasian landmass as one of these key spaces that determine the fate of global affairs. And Dugin is a curious figure because I think he is very much seen in the West as this Rasputin-like philosopher behind Putin, which he certainly is not. He's a kind of pop geopolitician. That's probably the most accurate term we can use for him. But in this sense, geopolitical imaginaries matterand imagining world affairs as somehow governed by these big spaces and understanding world affairs as somehow a contest and a clash between powers that dominate regions of the world, so this kind of pan regional world vision, is again a tenet of classical geopolitics, whether it's that of Halford MacKinder, those who followed after him, Nicholas Spykman, but it was also the favored world vision of Nazi and fascist geo politicians who saw a pan regional world.
And actually, and this is interesting to revive that conversation, they presented and Nazi geo politicians were very forceful in this, noting that only a pan regional world would maintain peace because each pan region governed by its guiding power, so in the case of Eurasia, this would be naturally Russia in this moment, the Monroe world run by the United States, that Donald Trump is certainly doing his best to reimagine. Each of these pan regional halls would have no need to enter into conflict with another pan region since it would somehow, you know, exhaust all its needs within its core and then attached resource peripheries. So, the discourse of peace of the sort of world that is being envisioned both by Trump and by Putin and we could add other regional imaginaries to this, such as the Chinese one is one that should greatly trouble us because it draws on a lineage of geopolitics that I certainly don't think any of us would like to see revived in the present.
SR: So let me turn to a much more pragmatic question Luiza. And that is if universities are to engage proactively in conversations about Europe's strive to re-arm itself and to strategically prioritize its defense needs, this should not be a conversation limited to just military technology and nuclear weapons.
It simply cannot mean just a return also to the kind of analysis of the connections between war and politics that thinkers like Michel Foucault pioneered half a century ago in “Society must be defended”[vi]. So my question to you is, what could a critical engagement with security issues look like today in an era of what Mary Kaldor has called “Forever Wars” and an expanded notion of so-called “total defense” that we are hearing of so much today?
LB: I'll come to the idea of total defense because it's very much part of the EU’s proposals. But there's an important distinction that I've been trying to make also in talking to colleagues here in Italy because I think there is a fundamental difference between engaging our political leaders, whether it's EU leaders, national leaders engaging militaries in conversation, in confrontation, also very directly on our campuses.
And engaging with military funding, for example, which is very much the case in the United States, but not only. And I think we need to draw that distinction because the waters are very frequently muddied. I think any engagement and especially any funding, needs to be assessed very carefully by universities, whether it is funding for biomedical research from pharmaceutical companies funding from fossil fuel companies or funding from defense agencies and companies. And there are mechanisms that we can useto ensure ethical conduct, to ensure sound science. And certainly, you know, we as social scientists can learn a lot from the failures and scandals that have been evident in the medical and biological sciences. But also, we have developed in a sense, forms of institutional audit mechanisms. I have to say that at my previous university in Amsterdam, the sort of model they proposed for all collaborations involving the fossil fuel industry, I think isgreat. But that's just one part of this discussion.
SR: Could you describe the model, Luiza, that was proposed?
LB: Sure. So it was a really interestingexperiment brought about by our students who protested the involvement of Shell on our campus that was funding several courses not just in the natural science departments, but also in business and economics courses, saying, we want to see in completely transparent fashion where the money is going, what sort of courses are being funded because this was not funding just research, but also teaching exactly what sort of material is being proposed, who is involved. And in the case of research paying very close attention in terms of the assessment, this was being done both by legal representatives from within the university, as well as scientific experts. And I think we could do this very easily, not just for collaboration with fossil fuel companies but also to assess collaboration.
We have all had this conversation regarding collaboration first with Russian universities and Russian academics, and subsequently with universities and academics in Israel, which is an ongoing conversation. And I think this should be something that we apply to all university collaborations with any state, with any government body, with any funding body.
And on the question of funding, one word of caution here, this is going to become an issue, a very big issue also with Horizon funding in the EU, which thus far, especially through the ERC stream, has been quite open. The commission is now giving, let's say, direction to make sure that further grants are much more closely aligned with the EU strategic priorities. And thus, again, if we don't question those strategic priorities, we're going to end up confronting them, let's say downstream when they come to us as directives for what sort of funding we can apply for. So, I say we intervene earlier, rather than later.
Coming back to what should we do in the current moment regarding the discussion on European defense? And what I had said previously that this is a conversation too important to be left to militaries and to defense industry executives alone. How do we do that? So how do we engage in a critical discussion of what this should mean for European states, for our societies, for our citizens? And beyond, I think certain parts of universities, so, security studies centers, we find this conversation distasteful, if not directly something that we don't think we should engage with.
And I guess, I'll make a very small kind of biographical note here because I'm saying this as somebody who was first formed politically within the peace movement. When I started university in the fall of 1988, those were the first engagements that pulled me in. I mean, as a child of the Cold War, I grew up with literally recurrent nightmares about nuclear annihilation.
So, finding myself today, pushing colleagues for a discussion of the EU’s defense capabilities and saying, we need to talk about defense. We need to also talk about the nuclear options that are being contemplated by our leaders right now. In the Italian context, this discussion is extremely fraught. Several Italian rectors have called in the past weeks to ban any engagement with the military or these kinds of questions on their campuses. From internships offered by the Italian Navy to collaborations with scholars with the defense industry the universities of Pisa, Sienna, most recently, the Polytechnic of Torino have just passed a motion to block any research projects and collaborations “with military uses”.
And Pisa has actually rewritten the statute of the university to specify this, citing the university's commitment to peace as an absolute value. Now, I think this is commendable, especially in the current moment, but in a European context, in a national context in which the push for enhanced military spending and research is a juggernaut, it's coming at us, it's happening. This is not going to happen by banning any discussion, any engagement with those that are making those decisions, and especially banning discussion with those who will be charged with implementing them. So, with European militaries in this way, we are doomed to be the subjects of the geopolitical decisions and the subjects of the geopolitical imaginations of others.
SR: So, let's talk about the other contentious issue, which is the cost of European rearmament. And if we don't engage in the debate, we have no voice on the table. But what we are seeing at the moment is longstanding fiscal orthodoxies in Europe, especially Germany is a good example, have now been declared to be defunct in the case of defense spending. The redistribution of budgetary resources nationally in so many countries in Europe would involve, I think, a tradeoff between welfare and warfare, which is already sparking fierce debates. And those are debates we should be engaging in at universities.
Could large and long overdue infrastructure investment a kind of peace time military Keynesianism solve this dilemma and squared the circle. So, what do you think are the key questions from the point of view of European political economy as resources get diverted from social spending, probably also from green transition into rearmament.
LB: So, this is a question that is extremely pressing and several colleagues, including Adam Tooze, have been writing on this. But I will give you just an example of how pressing this is. March 15th, 50,000 people gathered in the center of Rome, answering the call of an Italian journalist, Michele Serra, for a Square for Europe, Piazza per l’Europa, a call to reimagine the European Federal Project in the spirit of the manifesto of Ventotene, which by the way, called for shared defense. And so this amazinggathering, brought together leaders from across the left, cultural figures but beyond these wonderful calls to reimagine Europe in this moment of challenge there was a giant elephant in the room, that of common defense and the defense spending that the commission is calling for. There was a parallel trade union demonstration, specifically decrying this 800 billion spending on arms when health and social services are being cut. When previously it seemed impossible to call for any derogation to EU budget rules, and suddenly this relaxing of these sacred rules was being made possible for military uses.
And so, this idea that to make possible a European defense, anything goes. Now this, I think, underlines why we need to have this conversation. And we need to have it in very concrete terms, whether it's understanding exactly what sort of tradeoffs will be necessary, I mean, we are being told by the commission and certainly national leaders have been tying themselves up in knots to say, this is not going to be a tradeoff.
I think it's much more honest to think precisely what this could mean. And colleagues who are economists have been making these calculations. Former colleagues from Amsterdam have been writing for Bruegel, the economics think tank, various economic analysis of, how we could make defense spending a European public good. Others have been thinking of the sort of infrastructural industrial investment that this could be part of. So, the analyses are beginning to emerge. And, I think, that is where we should look very carefully beyond the broader conversation that we should be having, whether this is something that we desire as Europeans.
And one other word of caution and here, Adam Tooze has been very good in raising this word of caution: We keep talking about the rush to a war economy, with these parallels of interwar and World War II Europe, and I think he's been very good at noting that we're seeing nothing like the sort of mobilization of the thirties and forties being proposed. Evenin the most extreme versions of these proposals. if we're talking about raising defense spending to three to four percent of the GDP and you may disagree with that, that is what we are talking about, not 30 or 40 percent. And mass mobilization of the population as well. So, I think we need to keep that in perspective. Certainly, you know, tradeoffs will have to be made, but we should be part of that discussion. My concern is precisely that we need to democratize this discussion. We need to make this a discussion with everybody. We need to bring European citizens into this discussion.
We need to bring academics into this discussion, precisely to ensure that arms spending is not a tradeoff for welfare. And this, by the way, is the Far Right’s favorite talking point against common defense right now. We need to note that during the vote last week at the European Parliament, it was the sovereigntists, it was Salvini’s Lega here in Italy, it was Orban’s Fidesz, it was the Austrian FPÖ, Le Pen’s Assemblée nationale, the Spanish Vox. Portuguese Chega and Polish PiS that voted against it. I mean, is this the company that we wanted to keep?
SR: Let me turn Luiza to another question which we also need to discuss at universities, not just the cost of re-arming Europe, but the question of climate protection and green transition in this context.
The Pentagon is the largest consumer of energy and emitter of emissions in the U.S. probably in the world, but the carbon footprint and the fossil fuel dependence of any major military power be this Russia, China, or India, is extremely large, even in times of peace. And the question in this context is, can we somehow square the circle of rearmament and the acute crises of the environment?
LB: So, colleagues in critical military studies have this great term. They talk about the military carbon boot print rather than the footprint. And indeed, as you were mentioning, militaries and military infrastructures are some of the largest polluters and generators of the carbon boot print.
Also, other very important ways of impacting not just the climate, but also the environments in which they operate as well as, one of their accusations has been very rightly in, proposing a vision of world order that is far from sustaining and sustainable.
Now, I think here too, we need to take our military colleagues to task both the current NATO strategic concept and the EU strategic compass that delineate the defense visions for the next years, I won't say a decade, because now these are being re-envisioned very frequently as both claim that climate change is the key security challenge of our era. They see it as a key threat multiplier and claim that this is a key preoccupation for European militaries. Let's take them to task on this as people are already doing.And in a sense it is up to European militaries to face these questions from a very practical sense fromthe challenges of operating in environments that are now very difficult to operate in from, you know, extreme heat, sea water and sea level change and rise. The kind of considerations that are being made by European Navies regarding the challenges posed by the already enacted shifts brought by climate change. They're very much there. This of course, does not cancel the broader question of the military as an institution across the world that has this boot print, once more, I go back to my previous point of needing to press them further on this and work with them precisely on these questions. Not that they necessarily hold the solutions but unless we engage them, I think we're missing a very big part of the puzzle.
SR: Let's return Luiza, to what you have called different emotional geographies in various European universities, which have also shaped diverging attitudes about the urgency of overhauling European defense. Because much like defense, higher education also falls within the remit of nation states. So, the question here that occurs to me is, do different academic contexts foster rather distinct attitudes to the present geopolitical crises? I'm just thinking of the fact that the United Kingdom has no problem having departments of war studies, whereas at German universities, you only find departments of peace studies, and this might be a legacy of the second World War. Or do you see here intrinsic institutional or even disciplinary logics at work with different disciplines being very differently engaged in these kinds of conversations?
And then let me take up another point, which you just made very forcefully about what we are seeing as a united effort by European far right parties who are all rejecting a common European army, a common European defense policy, all in the name of national sovereignty. But these are, in most cases, Italy is an exception, but in most cases, parties, which do not see Putin and Russia as a threat to European democracies. So, what are the risks of academia choosing to just remain on the sidelines in this really, really difficult situation?
LB: I think that's why I feel this urgency. And as I said, I think coming from my own background, both, being born in the peace movement and then later as a green. And as you will be aware, European greens have undergone their own transformation in the past years. But also I think as a geographer, there aregeographical national distinctions between academies and how we face these issues and even if we think they are talkable about right. But also important disciplinary distinctions. So certainly, the fact that geographers have long held this discussion at bay comes from our very problematic past as complicit with state power and especially as complicit with authoritarian regimes. Now, having said thatand I've noticed this, these distinctions over the past years I think the kind of conversations I have been able to have with my students in Poland and for over a decade I've taught at the College of Europe on its Natolin campus, where I teach the required course on geopolitics. The sort of conversations I have there with students, obviously not just from Poland, from across Eastern and southeastern Europe, students from the Maghreb, but students from actually around Europe as well are very different to the sort of discussions I would be able to have in Amsterdam or in Italy. And so I think, this is something that we need to recognize that those distinctions are there. And there are also the important divisions regarding the perception of the threats that we've been talking about. And you mentioned the fact that for the Far-Right parties in the European Parliament that voted against the proposals for a common defense budget, none of them see Putin as a threat if anything, they see him as a fellow traveler in the sort of world that they would like to enact. Whether it's sovereigntists, imperial visions, appeals to traditional values. Take your pick. I mean to me the most striking part of this is seeing a party like the Polish PiS that had made its standard, kind of anti-communist battle even after the collapse of communism. That suddenly is not only questioning Poland's continued support to Ukraine but has changed its position regarding Putin. And, certainly to side much more with the Trumpian vision of the world.
But back to how can we go beyond those divisions? I can fly the European flag here and say we need to join in this conversation together because this is in a sense, our only chance to reclaim the European project, reclaim the possibility that perhaps, and I'm not saying this can necessarily happen. The other options are just simply not there. I mean, retreating into our national gardens as it may be to cite Borrell is not going to take us anywhere. We are faced with a new world, with new challenges, whether we can formulate a joint response to these battling authoritarianisms. This can be only done collectively and collectively also as academics. I think these conversations are beginning. But we need to kind of start talking to people who also we perhaps find distasteful. Perhaps we don't feel we share world views with, but I think we need to be very much part of this conversation.
SR: Let me turn to a final question, Luiza, from these spatial imaginaries and spatial predicaments to temporal ones. It'll probably take Europe the better part of the next decade, at least, to ramp up arms production and to reach the desired capacities for self-defense and security levels that it's hoping to achieve.
Increased tempo is precipitated due to the policies of the Trump administration turning its back on the special transatlantic partnership after the Second World War, and instead the U.S. administration cozying up to Putin to the detriment of America's commitment to Europe's defense through NATO. I mean, this is a really epochal shift since 1945. Does the EU have enough time to make these necessary changes and could the pressure of time precipitate wrong and hasty policy decisions which could actually escalate tensions and worsen the situation.
LB: And I think that's where we come in because we as critical academics,if I can frame it that way because I think the risk is precisely being presented, the logic of no alternative.
So, one choice, the slogans that von der Leyen has been repeating since the first geopolitical commission took office in 2019. We must become geopolitical to respond to this changing world. But what does that mean? So, we need to question what that means while recognizing that the world has indeed changed and to slow down the discussion in a sense.
So, we need to both enter into the fast forum. We need to be present in policy discussions. We need to be willing and able to engage with the discussion as it is ongoing, but also slow these discussions down and add to them, and if we simply reject them, if we reject engagement, then we have lost. And here once more, I would put in an appeal to engaging also, not just policy makers, not just politicians, EU politicians, EU policy makers, national ones, but also engaging colleagues in the military and in military institutions. Because they may offer equally critical perspectives thatwe are simply not attuned to, we don't want to listen to. We very often just assume that they are part of the project. I mean, in the conversations that I have been able to have, they are equally not more critical of some of the proposals that are being made, if only with the awareness of what this will actually take. So, the grand pronouncements of a European army of ramped up defense production of the sort of reconversion that is being imagined by politicians and industry leaders. People involved in actually daily strategic planning or the management of armed forces are much more cautious about. And I think we need that word of caution, but especially I think, we need to intervene to slow the speed of this discussion. And yes, it needs to happen, the discussion needs to happen, but I think the choices need to be much more reasoned and we need to enter into that reasoning process also, perhaps with bedfellows that we feel uncomfortable with.
SR: Thank you so much Luiza, for this strong pleading for universities to get out of their comfort zone and engage with partners in constructive dialogue partners that we necessarily perhaps don't agree with or even talk to in the normal course of our work. Thanks for this really fascinating discussion with a lot of insights into both the need for this wide-ranging discussion, also cautioning against some of its risks, but also urging us to not stay on the sidelines and be onlookers to events which are really developing at a breathtaking pace. Thank you so much.
LB: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunityto share these thoughts because as you can tell from some of my responses, I am not only preoccupied, but also very frustrated at, you know, our inability as critical geographers, as critical academics in general to engage with these shifts and I think this last question regarding the speed, I thinkthe temporal dimension is very important. We need to engage in these discussions now, not in the two years it takes for a peer reviewed paper to come out. And we need tomake ourselves uncomfortable if we don't want to again be the subjects of the decisions and the imaginaries for Europe for a different world taken by others.
SR: My conversation with Luiza Bialasiewicz revolved around several contentious debates about the role of universities and engaged academics in a rapidly changing world. She began by pointing out that governments are using budgetary pressure to impose a range of constraints on academic institutions from revising curricula or setting research agendas, all the way to policing political activism on campuses. But she went on to argue that universities are not only threatened by such external interference, they're also at risk due to increasingly polarizing divisions within the academic community itself. An alarming phenomenon she traced to the rapid rise of conspiratorial imaginaries during the pandemic.
These imaginaries may be a symptom of our increasing difficulty to make sense of a world out of control and compounded by worrisome geopolitical shifts. But it may equally well be an effect of active disinformation campaigns orchestrated by political actors interested in sowing doubt about scientific knowledge.
Unfortunately, the deepening divisions within universities, even within self-styled progressive groups of academics and intellectuals, professors and students, prevent a lot of otherwise urgent discussions from taking place. In Luiza’s view, the stifling of such debates in many European universities is shortsighted. It's also misguided as it would be the responsibility of engaged academics to interrogate critically the European Union strategic geopolitical priorities as framed by politicians and policy analysts. Above all, the current race for rearmament and defensive militarization needs urgent debate at universities. Instead of disengagement and the retreat to ill-conceived pacifism, she advocates engaging both political leaders and also militaries in conversations. The latter may also be able to offer critical perspectives different from the kind that we are attuned to within the confines of our disciplinary worlds. She also called for vigilant systematic oversight of any impact military funding may have on academic research and teaching practices. Collaboration with external funding bodies, national or supernational, should be subjected to strict standards of transparency and accountability so that strategic priorities of funders don't dictate the direction of our future research. Simply protesting, boycotting, or even banning all engagement with questions of security or military defense will only render universities the subjects of geopolitical decisions and imaginations of others as Luiza put it today.
Critical debates about the new European defense architecture are also needed because of the trade-offs entailed, as well as its broader ecological impact. Recognizing the urgency of our collective response should nevertheless not be framed as a false narrative of necessity without alternatives, nor should the sense of urgency prevent us from slowing discussions down to enable a greater sense of democratic participation. Only by democratizing the discussion about the various trade-offs can we preempt an opportunistic monopolization of descent by far-right parties that are currently posturing as the defenders of European welfare states, while downplaying the need for overhauling any military capabilities. To this end, universities will have to transcend the narrow confines of their respective national context. They'll have to address the challenge of collective European deliberation and coordination without, of course reviving the discredited and historically disastrous geopolitical imaginaries of pan regionalism that many forces on the far right continue to champion even today.
This was the ninth episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks’ time when my guest will be the Canadian public intellectual Michael Ignatieff, who, who is my colleague, and also was my predecessor as president and rector of Central European University. Against the backdrop of the surprising electoral victory of the liberal party in Canada recently, Michael and I will discuss the challenges that confront progressive politics in Europe, especially liberal parties and politics that are faced with growing popular support for extreme right-wing parties.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast, if you're enjoying it, you can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] Bialasiewicz, L. (2024). Geographical storylines and the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Narrative power and narrative taboos, a (difficult) conversation. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 42(7), 1105–1107. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241276325
[ii] Bialasiewicz, L. (2020). The social and spatial forms of the Far Right across Europe. Political Geography, 81, 102243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102243
[iii] Bialasiewicz, L., & Gentile, V. (Eds.). (2020). Spaces of tolerance: Changing geographies and philosophies of religion in today's Europe. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429274732
[iv] Bialasiewicz, L. (Ed.). (2011). Europe in the world: EU geopolitics and the making of European space. Ashgate Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315580838
[v] Mary Kaldor on NATO, Human Security, the Changing Face of Global War and the Effectiveness of Sanctions and Debt Cancellation | Democracy in Question?
[vi] Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (M. Bertani & A. Fontana, Eds.; D. Macey, Trans.). Picador.