In the tempests of transformation

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

Can Europe sustain global industrial competition? Join Prof. Philipp Ther as he discusses the caesura of 2004 and the prospects of European industrial policy based on historical case studies about shipbuilding.

What did the transformation from ‘socialism’ to ‘democracy’ and a market economy entail? When did it begin and did it ever end? Prof. Philipp Ther's new multography proposes a new temporality of transformation: he argues that its beginning dates in the mid 1970s, when socialist countries were hit by the global Oil Crisis and responded in ways that ultimately led to the downfall of communism. He also extends the timing of the end of ‘post-socialist’ transformation: accession to the European Union and the EU’s competition laws put an end to local social and political tactics that kept alive the shipyards, and maintained coherence and familiarity across the political rupture of 1989.

Philipp Ther is Professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna, where he also founded the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET). Previously he was professor of comparative European history at the EUI. Four of his monographs have been published in English: Europe since 1989: A history (Princeton UP; the German original was awarded the non-fiction book prize of the Leipzig Bookfare); The Dark Side of Nation States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe, and Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in 19th Century Central Europe; The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (Princeton UP). His most recent German books are Das andere Ende der Geschichte: Über die Große Transformation (2019) and a co-authored book In den Stürmen der Transformation. Zwei Werften zwischen Sozialismus und EU (2022). In 2019 he was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize by the Austrian Research Fund.