SCHUMAN LECTURE

Democratising the Future in Today’s Europe

WED 6 MAY, 20:00

Franz Palm Lecture Hall, Tongersestraat 53

 

Jonathan White, PhD

Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics

 

Democracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: today's problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrow's elections. However, the waning of the future as a political lodestar is widely reported today. Whereas modern Europe was built by movements and parties in pursuit of a better world to come, today’s politicians seem increasingly focused on short-term concerns and the effort to preserve a receding status quo.

 

In this eye-opening lecture Jonathan White investigates who leads, and who contests, this abdication of the future, and what follows for our societies and institutions. As will be argued, how the future is envisioned is politically crucial, shaping expectations of who should hold power, how it should be exercised, and for the sake of what ends.

 

Much hangs on whose outlooks come to prevail. Those who neglect the future give a free pass to others – such as the powerful ideologues of Silicon Valley – to use it in advance of their own ends.  What might it mean to democratise the future in the contemporary European context? And why is a political commitment to the long-term the best way to safeguard democracy?

 

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics. His books include In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile Books, 2024), Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2019), and – with Lea Ypi – The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford University Press, 2016).  In addition to his academic publications he has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and Boston Review.  He was awarded the 2017 British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in political science. The Dutch translation of In the Long Run is available as Over honderd jaar (Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds).

 

Schuman Lecture

Every year, Maastricht University and the City of Maastricht jointly organise this lecture in commemoration of Robert Schuman and the Treaties of Rome (1957) and Maastricht (1992). Robert Schuman (1886-1963) was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and co-founder of the European Union.