(Geo)Political Implications of Nostalgia
Third session of the 2025-2026 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar “Dépaysements”: Clues and Trajectories.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday 12th December, 2025, 10 am
Language: French
Speaker: Adam Bence BALAZS (Jean Monnet Chair, University of Passau)
Discussant: Jay ROWELL (Marc Bloch Center, Berlin)
Abstract
Nostalgia is in fashion. A recurring motif in the cultural industry, the concept encourages us to reexamine great historical narratives (for example, The Odyssey) in order to better understand the psychological and social phenomena arising in response to contemporary challenges such as migration and integration. Between the experiences of emigration, exile, and rootlessness, nostalgia lies directly at the crossroads of literature, clinical practice and political debate. Outside of its personal and intimate meanings, it is also a social phenomenon (Durkheim), participating in the “social framework of memory” (Halbwachs).
A collective weakness easily exploited by anti-democratic forces, could nostalgic discourse be an indicator of authoritarian tendencies? In the world of geopolitics, regret over past greatness plays a prominent role. The way in which Vladimir Putin speaks of the Soviet Union, the call to “Make America Great Again”, Serbian and Hungarian revisionism or even the French concept of grandeur; the proliferation of vague references to some glorious past reveals a certain unease regarding contemporary challenges. Could nostalgia, then, be a political defect within the multipolar confusion of the global world, a toxic form of disorientation that undermines Europe’s sense of direction at a time of major democratic and geopolitical challenges?
Adam Bence Balazs (*1982) is a lecturer and researcher at the Jean Monnet Chair for European Politics at the University of Passau. He is affiliated with the Laboratoire de Changement Social et Politique (LCSP, Paris Cité University) and the Zentrum für Demokratieforschung (Andrássy University, Budapest). His research focuses on the politics of weakness in international relations (following on from Herfried Münkler and Bertrand Badie), the Hungarian counter-model in the European Union, and the European integration of the Western Balkans. At the meeting point between geopolitics and political philosophy, his works investigate political and social weaknesses (including nostalgia) as origins and instruments for authoritarian regimes.
See the complete program of the 2025-2026 seminar here.