April 5-6, 2024 | University of Ottawa, Canada 

May 30-31, 2024 | University of Lille, France

Since the 18th century, the discourse on modernization—understood as a process aiming to align social organization with the expectations and needs of societies and carrying a promise of emancipation—identifies the Western form of modernity, in its political (democracy) and economic (capitalism) dimensions, as a model to follow. In the multicultural empires of Central and Eastern Europe, divergences in the paths and rhythms of political, economic, and social modernization engraved in collective imaginaries the idea of a structural delay of these societies compared to the rest of Europe, relegating them to the periphery—or semi-periphery—of the Western world (Ivan T. Berend). Since the works of Larry Wolf and Maria Todorova, this sort of intra-European orientalism has been deconstructed. Nevertheless, the discourse of structural delay in this part of Europe compared to the core of the western world has been influential in the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires and in the countries that succeeded them, from the end of the First World War to today. This discourse justified structural reforms and enabled the rise of social groups interested in and useful for these reforms. It also fueled dissenting discourses and contributed to the production of alternative models, in a relationship of interdependence and exchange with countries situated in the core of the Western world (Claudia Kraft). This conference aims to examine the experience of Central and Eastern European countries with the modernization process from the late 18th century to the present, beyond the center-periphery dynamics.