The history of Europe cannot be understood without taking mobilities into account. We want to draw on this approach to European history - as argued by Tara Zahra, Elizabeth Buettner, Fatima El-Tayeb, and others – to better understand processes of Europeanization and their link to mobilities. What Europe is and where it is located can only be understood through mobilities: Mobilities connect different parts of the continent, lead people into or out of Europe, create a sense of Europeanness inside and outside Europe, and confront people with European politics of migration control.
An understanding of Europeanization through a focus on mobility highlights the paradox in today’s discussions of freedom of movement as a pillar of the European Union: while mobility within Europe for EU citizens is presented as freedom, mobility to or through Europe for non-EU citizens is often restricted, discouraged, criminalized, and punished. The porosity – or perceived porosity – of borders for some is therefore linked to the intensification of border control for others. From the massive waves of emigration in the 19th century to flight and exile during the Second World War, labor immigration since the 1950s, and the so-called migratory crises since the 2010s, mobility has played a central role in shaping Europe as a historical region.
This workshop seeks to incorporate this perspective into our teaching of European history: in contrast to often linear public narratives about European integration on an institutional level and the idea of European history based on a shared “identity” or “culture”, we want to explore the more complicated history of lived experiences and everyday lives, the changing spatial dimensions of European history, and the fluctuating boundaries of the continent. Teaching European history from below allows for a better understanding of the ambivalences of Europeanization that present a continent coming together through framings of ‘unity in diversity.’ We want to focus on lived experiences of Europeanization as a contested process of referring to and identifying with an imagined community and include underrepresented or marginalized voices in our syllabi in order to enrich a mere political history. Furthermore, by foregrounding mobilities, we can establish connections to current political issues by highlighting migrant contributions to the continent and problematizing debates focusing on the supposed threats associated with the mobility of non-EU citizens. This perspective shifts the focus away from narratives of crisis towards a longue durée of European entanglements with the world, while still underlining power asymmetries.
We understand mobility foremost as the mobility of people. Of course, commodities, ideas, and practices also circulated, but rarely without the mobility of those carrying, sending, or articulating them. As suggested by Kiran Klaus Patel and Ulrike von Hirschhausen, we define Europeanization, as a multifaceted and non-linear process of Europe becoming more relevant as a point of reference in different historical contexts. We want to explore how people made sense of “Europe,” how, when, and why they referred to it, how they framed and discussed it. We are interested in how migrants, travelers, writers, refugees, politicians, colonial officials, engineers, and others referred to Europe or to themselves as Europeans, and what it meant – or did not mean – to them.
For our workshop we suggest four thematic angles:
1) Tourist Travel: Experiencing Europe inside the Continent
Bourgeois leisure travelers started “discovering Europe” through practices such as Alpinism or spa tourism (Bädertourismus) in the middle of the nineteenth century. Not only did leisure mobility bring members of the middle class together in precise settings but also made Europe “accessible”. British historian and mountaineer Leslie Stephen in his book “The Playground of Eu-rope” described Alpinism as an opportunity to “look down upon Europe from Rotterdam to Venice and from Varna to Marseille”. New cultural landscapes were created, and these could be perceived as regional, national or European. This booming tourist industry not only connected the continent and brought tourists from different regions together but also established a link to its peripheries: Travelling with the “Orient Express” – which involved nine railway companies in five European countries – allowed people to traverse the whole of Europe, moving between Paris and Istanbul and therefore gaining experience of Europe’s margins, where (in an orientalist perception) Europe met its Other. In the 20th century, travelling should create a sense of Europeanness, especially in the context of programs such as Interrail, which since the 1970s allowed young people to “discover Europe”, but also in the sense of student mobility within the Erasmus program. We want to analyze the impact of inner European mobility on perceptions of Europeanness.
2) Colonialist Departure: Europeanness as a Category outside of Europe
The movement of researchers, missionaries, settlers, soldiers, mercenaries, domestic workers, workers, bureaucrats, but also “poor whites” (such as day laborers, sex workers or drug traffickers) to the colonies created a category of Europeanness in an extra-European setting that often manifested as transimperial encounters between nationals from different European states. Therefore, we are interested in the mobilities of those who traveled with ideas and concepts of ‘civilization,’‘progress,’ and ‘Europe’ or ‘Europeanness’ to the colonies, who created European scientific communities or who belonged to the multinational European populations across Empire. We encourage a global perspective beyond a simple exchange between metropoles and their peripheries by adopting a focus on transimperial mobilities and entanglements. Multinational European settler populations often lived in separate neighborhoods apart from the local population, such as villes européennes in French-colonized Tunis or quartiere europeo in Italian colonized Asmara. Ideas about “Paneuropa,” “Atlantropa,” and “Eurafrica” from the 1920s onwards also perpetuated ideas about mobility when conceptualizing Africa as a demographic and economic extension of Europe and developing large-scale infrastructure projects such as transcontinental railroads. We want to explore these and other conceptions of Europeanness abroad.
3) The Experience of Deportation and Exile: A Sense of Europe through Loss and a Community of Coercion
“Europe” as a point of reference and lived experience also played a role during the period of rising National Socialism and World War II. For many Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals like Theodor W. Adorno or Erika Mann fleeing Nazi Germany, “Europe” became an important emotional and intellectual touchstone. From the vantage point of their exile, these intellectuals mourned their departures and observed the atrocities from afar. For them, “Europe” became a symbol of immeasurable loss, charged with nostalgia. In particular, the experience of a modern and allegedly superficial American society was contrasted with an authentic European culture. But this view was undercut by the catastrophe of the Holocaust and the immense suffering of WWII. At the same time, Europeans experienced continental interconnectedness through catastrophe: Deportees to Nazi concentration camps like the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún or French writer Stéphane Hessel claimed that through the multinational coerced community within concentration camps they had experienced an “European spirit” and started thinking about building another Europe, in contrast to the “German Europe” promoted by the Nazis. Survivors' associations continued to refer to this experience of an “SS Europe” well into the 1950s. We want to scrutinize notions and ideas of Europe that emerged from the experiences of exile and deportation.
4) (Return) Migration: Towards Europe as a Question of (Non)Belonging
Research on post-imperial migration during the second part of the 20th century has shown how concepts of Europeanness, and especially its racial character, influenced the experiences of migrants heading to metropoles following the independence of former colonies. From the possibilities and restrictions linked to conceptions of a (post-)imperial citizenship in the case of the Commonwealth or French Algerians to the framing of “return” migration for the descendants of European settlers upon decolonization, the reception of migrants in European centers was based on, and in turn influenced by, forms of European (non)belongings. From the contrasting fate of the Harkis or pieds-noirs in France, to the acceptance and ostracization of returnados in Portugal and the debates regarding Indische Nederlanders in the Dutch press, the entanglement of decolonization and migration shows how forms of (non)belonging and mobility were at the core of questions of Europeanness in the twentieth century Experiences of labor migration in the context of “guest worker” agreements as well as the mobility of students from the global South might also have produced a sense of Europeanness in addition to the arrival in a specific national or regional context. We want to discuss how to take these experiences into consideration when exploring cultural and social processes of Europeanization.
Beyond these thematic axes, we also welcome contributions on topics such as communist net-works, fascist mobility, and related forms of political travel, provided that they engage with Europe as a reference point, an idea used or alluded to by contemporaries to make sense of their experiences.
In this workshop between the 2nd and 4th of December 2026 at the Global Studies Institute (University of Geneva) in collaboration with the Centre Sidjanski en études européennes (University of Geneva) and the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies (Europa-Universität Flensburg), we invite scholars working on European history to discuss the role played by mobility in the creation, circulation, reference to and contestation of Europe as both a concept and an idea. We are particularly interested in how participants reflect the role of mobility in the teaching of European history (BA and MA level), and how engaging with mobility can help diversify the curriculum and pedagogical tools. Such approaches may foster a more critical understanding of the continent’s history within a global perspective. Contributions could also include reflections on departmental discussions or policy exchanges within or between institutions of higher education.
Our aim is to address the fact that concepts such as Europeanization from below and multiple forms of Europeanization often remain abstract in the scholarly literature, while teaching requires concrete source material to be effective. We are consequently looking for contributions that engage with historical sources and reflect on how these can be integrated into teaching. We invite scholars to present papers addressing both analytical and pedagogical dimensions. This could take the form of a case study accompanied by reflections on how it can be discussed and presented to students, or a report on a pedagogical intervention that has proven particularly effective.
As a possible outcome of the workshop, we are considering the creation of teaching toolkits designed to incorporate mobility and Europeanization into European history curricula, with the aim of globalizing, provincializing, and diversifying the teaching of European history. These materials may include digital resources such as short video capsules, as well as curated source anthologies accompanied by scholarly commentary for student use.
We invite interested historians and scholars working with historical methods to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, outlining the aspect of the topic they wish to address and the source(s) they plan to engage with, along with a short biographical note, by June 10 to sebastien.tremblay@uni-flensburg.de (Seminar für Geschichte und Geschichtsdidaktik, Europa-Universität Flensburg) and sarah.frenking@unige.ch (Département d’histoire générale and GSI, University of Geneva). NB: We are seeking additional funding and will likely be able to cover some travel expenses for scholars based in Europe. Unfortunately, we will not be able to cover expenses related to Swiss visa requirements.