Profile
About us
The Viadrina Institute for European Studies conducts interdisciplinary research into social, political and cultural figurations on the European continent and its global interdependencies. The focus is on historical and contemporary processes of Europeanisation, including their inherent ambivalences. In this sense, IFES research aims to provide impulses for a well-founded reflection on Europe and to establish a critical perspective within European studies.
History
The phase of fundamental and simultaneous change in political, legal and economic systems appears to be over. Instead of „transformation“ in Europe, there is a coexistence of basically democratically governed states in the orbit of the EU and autocracies increasingly in Russia's neighbourhood. In contrast to the Ära of real socialism, however, Eastern Europe is integrated into the global economy, has elements of a market economy and is socially connected to Central and Western Europe.
As the successor institute to the former Frankfurt Institute for Transformation Studies, whose focus was primarily on transformation processes in Eastern Europe, the research activities of the IFES relate to Europe as a whole, which is characterised by multiple interdependencies and a high degree of social change.
The FIT has thus merged into the multidisciplinary IFES, which retains the previous focus on Europe as a whole, with special consideration of Central and Eastern Europe, but adapts it to the content requirements of current European research. Throughout Europe, social contrasts are considerable, public debates are charged and political volatility is high. In Central Europe (and also in large parts of Southeast Europe), it is no longer about the transition to democracy, but about variations on a core concept of democracy and a market economy. In Eastern Europe, constellations are repeatedly emerging in which the power and energy of social change in post-socialism can become relevant foils for action for the rest of Europe - be it in dealing with multiple crises, in adapting to the challenges of globalisation and Europeanisation or through lively and practical debates on Europe. Such impulses need to be put into productive dialogue with those from Western and Southern Europe and integrated into research.
Instead of a concept of transformation that is often understood as a teleological process, research at IFES is based on an openness to processes of social, political, cultural and economic change. Ideas, models and discourses are included as objects of research (rather than normative objectives) with regard to Eastern Europe as a whole and Eastern Europe in particular. The historical contextualisation of the current dialectic of integration and disintegration, particularly in Eastern Europe, is linked to the crisis-ridden developments of the EU in Western Europe.
In comparison to the initial programme of system transformation on which the FIT was based, there are clear shifts. The focus is less on the establishment of new constitutional and economic systems than on their discursive and real consequences. The secondary consequences of the transformation thus also entail a change in research perspectives. In Central Europe (and also in large parts of Southern Europe), it is no longer about the transition to democracy, but about varieties of a core concept of democracy and market economy.