The war in Ukraine is having a dramatic impact on the political imagination of Europe. It has reframed the East-West divide by replacing the Cold War narrative of the past decades with one of decolonization and the threat for the sovereignty of the European nation states born out of the disintegration of the 20th century continental empires. The war does not simply change the borders of Europe but also the nature of EU's external borders. It increases the tensions between the imperative for geopolitical EU and the imperative to preserve the constitutional integrity of the Union. This lecture by Ivan Krastev was held on October 4, 2022 at the Levis Faculty Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and member of the Board of Directors of GLOBSEC. He was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times (2015-2021) and is currently a Financial Times contributing editor. Ivan Krastev is the author of "Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe" (Allen Lane, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes - won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize; "After Europe" (UPenn Press, 2017); "Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest" (UPenn Press, 2014) and "In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?" (TED Books, 2013). Ivan Krastev is the winner of the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing 2020.