Context

Politics and/​or Culture — What forms Europe?
Markus Prutsch 

Video

Please note that this video is available in German.

As part of the exhibition Europe: Ancient Future, Dr. Markus J. Prutsch will speak about Europe in his role as Senior Researcher of the European Parliament. From the perspective of a historian, Prutsch approaches the shaping forces of Europe, reflecting on the role of politics as well as culture.

He poses the question of how a European identity could be conceived in view of the rather large differences between the individual, European states. The answer cannot lie in the strengthening of nationalism, but requires a historical reflection of Europe as a space of common cultural as well as political values. These should not be determined from above, however, but rather require the promotion of citizens’ initiatives and civil society, which the historian Prutsch illustrates by means of several projects. It becomes clear that Europe and the EU are living projects and ideally are supported by a broad basis that negotiates and updates the common European history again and again. In this respect, the lecture goes beyond the current status of the Union and continues to think Europe in a larger context.

PD Dr. Markus J. Prutsch (*1981 Wagna, lives in Brussels and Strasbourg) is Senior Researcher and Administrator in the European Parliament, responsible for the policy field of culture and education, Private Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Heidelberg and member of the Global Young Academy as well as fellow of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. After studying history and political science in Austria and Germany, he was a research assistant at the European University Institute (Florence), where he received his PhD in 2009 with a thesis on 19th-century political history and theory. Prutsch was a researcher at the University of Helsinki as part of the international research project Europe 1815 – 1914 before moving to the European institutions in 2011.

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