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Short abstract:

It's clear what politics does to rivers: it turns them into borders, transport routes and sources of energy. But what do rivers do to politics? This paper engages with this question with the help of the Danube: the only river in Europe that connects the Eastern and the Western parts of the continent

Long abstract:

It is more or less clear what politics does to rivers: it turns them into well-policed borders, busy transportation routes and sources of hydraulic energy. But what do rivers do to politics? More precisely, what kinds of politics becomes thinkable and doable if we foreground rivers and their modalities? In this paper I engage with this question with the help of the Danube: the only river in Europe that connects the Eastern and the Western parts of the continent, flowing from the Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea in Romania and Ukraine. Blurring the boundaries between the past and the present, nature and culture, and the East and the West, my contribution to the ‘Voicing Places’ panel revisits the Danube Confederacy – a more than a century old proposal to organise countries along the river into a political entity – as an impossible political imaginary. It then uses ethnographic fragments collected along the Danube to indicate how the impossibility of this political imaginary has been shaping political practices on the shores of the river, both within the world of nation states and beyond it.