Lecture | Research talk
Europe’s Historical Legacy of 1989 in the Geopolitical Context
- Date
- Wednesday 15 April 2026
- Time
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 2.60
Sponsored by the mobility component of the MA European Politics and Society degree programme.
Abstract
The recent geopolitical shifts, the challenges in the EU-transatlantic relations, and the re-invention of the EU’s role as a collective actor, suggest a call for a new interpretation of Europe`s modern history and the events of the early 1990s. This requires revisiting the lessons concerning the EU foreign and security policy (in former Yugoslavia), the closely related EU enlargement process since 2004, and the legitimizing strategies of what Europe is and to whom it belongs, in the post-1989 period. This talk will examine the EU's ideological project before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political-economic context of the early 1990s, the closely related foreign and security affairs, and the lessons for the EU in the new geopolitical context. It will revisit the political, economic, and social transformations of the post-1989 period in both the East and the West and will discuss the role of the (EU) state and the Maastricht Treaty for understanding the EU’s contemporary challenges.
Speaker Biography
Dr Tudzarovska is an Assistant Professor in Modern European Politics at the Department of European Studies, IMS, Charles University in Prague. She is co-convenor of the UACES Research Network “Re-thinking Europe’s East-West Divide. She has held the position of Head of Research in International Relations at UNYP and has led and supervised Foreign and Security Programs at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) - British Embassy in Skopje and the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation (KAS) from 2007-2017. She was the chief editor of the political-economic Journal "Political Thought” published by KAS. Since 2017, she is an expert member of the Global Initiative Network (GIN) based in Geneva.
Her works appears in Comparative European Politics, Routledge, Palgrave, European Review of International Studies (2025), and elsewhere. Her forthcoming co-edited book „Handbook of Comparative Politics of Central and Eastern Europe“ (2026) with Julia Rone and Eli Gateva is published with Bloomsbury Publishing, London. She regularly contributes to the media with comments/op-eds for Social Europe, Politics and Rights Review, International Politics and Society, Financial Times (cited), and elsewhere.