Bo Stråth

An experiended need for new world history, an alternative to the globalization narrative, was behind the initiation of this project in 2008. An alternative with a focus on how we conceptualize cohabitation on Earth, realizing that humans are not the only inhabitants, as opposed to the story about the transportation of commodities on a world market without borders where human labour, too, became commodities. This experienced need for a new conceptualization in 2008 has since then gained profile and precision in the argument for a planetary perspective on cohabitation on Earth.

Perceptions of social inequality at a European level were behind the initiation of this project. An important question was whether the emergence, interpretations and regulations of social inequalities is transformed by new centre-periphery structures in the EU. The project addressed the tension in the fact that EU is an economy but not a polity, a market but not a state. The focus was on the tension that emerges when social disintegration in the wake of market integration cannot be matched by redistributive politics to adjust for inequalities however they are defined.

The focus of this project was the diversity and plurality of cultural orientations and, moreover, ever-shifting cultural practices within Europe. Historical ruptures challenge continuities and instability coexist with stabiity.

This project studied innovatively the European public sphere. It questioned the prevailing conceptualisation of public spheres as nationally bounded and developing together with the nation state. It proposed an alternative, networked, and fluid conception of the public sphere that captures best the dynamic nature of the European public sphere, or indeed any public sphere in the 21st century.

The union between Sweden and Norway was established in 1814 after the continental turbulence provoked by the Napoleonic wars. It was dissolved in 1905 when Norway broke up from the arrangement imposed upon them by the European power game in the post-Napoleonic reordering. The book is an in-depth study of the union and its preconditions.The rise of the German empire shook its basis and the issue of democracy broke it up.

The project's focus was multicultural metropolitan spaces for exploring the new challenges and opportunities associated with contemporary social and
cultural transformations; especially those associated with migration.

The project's aim was to explore the preconditions of European social citizenship given the historical fact that the social dimension of citizenship is deeply entrenched in national histories. What did the expanding market radicalism in the 1990s mean for the preconditions?

Under the assumption that domestic and European components constitute national identities, the aim of the project was to analyse and compare the combination of national-cum-European
components in national identities and representations of Europe and the EU with a special reference to the role of the media in their (trans)formation.

The object of the interdisciplinary project at the outset was to foster a deeper understanding of why basically similar processes of modernisation have resulted in different problem resolutions. The question of governability and social cohesion and division studied through an analytical focus on language and culture was at the centre of the project.