Paper short abstract:

I consider how Europe is stitched back together through patterns of transit and transfer, sometimes fluid sometimes contested. Europe is presented as the outcome of diverse forms of crossborder exchanges and transborder returns, themselves shaping traditional ideas of place and political imagination

Paper long abstract:

There might be one Europe, but many ways of doing it taking place simultaneously.

We thus deal with a key, understudied question: how a series of parts remain in relation to each other after a crisis, and another crisis, and one more crisis. Europe(s) happens through the back and forth move of people and ideas, by transferring, displacing, dispersing and dividing. We take part in Europe through acts of sharing that are themselves generative of specific social relations, nexus and spaces between nations (Čapo 2014). However, too little attention has been paid to the socio-technical infrastructures (channels, protocols, rituals, and policies) that facilitate the iterance to happen–the multiple returns and exchanges going through multiscalar intersections.

The idea of Europe brings together differently positioned agents speaking to each other. It is cultivated in constructed common grounds and through different forms of partaking and partaging. Europe, therefore, appears as more than a geographical continent and a historical community. It is a projection that happens through exchanges. Alas, this elusive quality has implications for the relations between spaces, actors and scales.

As we can see in the case of Narva, Europe has more to do with political horizons and particular forms of engagement and renewal than with essences (Čapo 2019; Eriksen 2019; Martínez 2019; Strathern 2021). In Narva, Europe is performed between multiple intellectual, institutional, legal and financial threads, enacted through forms of cross-border exchanges and acts of transfer and return, instead of a spatial sense of fixity (Green and Laviolette 2015; Laviolette et al. 2019).