About the Journal
The Interdisciplinary Review of ValEUs (IRV) is an open-access venue for critical EU scholarship and the flagship publication of ValEUs, a Jean Monnet Network funded through the Erasmus+ programme, comprising twenty higher education institutions across seventeen countries and five continents (2024–2026).
The journal takes as its premise that Europe is not a stable object to be described but a shifting pattern to be argued over. Although the European Union grounds itself formally in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the accumulated crises of the past two decades — the Great Recession, the 2015 migration wave, Brexit, the pandemic, and the collapse of diplomatic unity over Ukraine and Gaza — have exposed European values as a site of continual contestation rather than settled doctrine. The IRV exists to make that contestation legible, combining fundamental questions about the EU’s self-understanding and colonial legacies with critical analysis of its ability — and willingness — to uphold the values it proclaims amid increasingly complex and volatile political realities, both within and outside the Union. This work takes shape through research articles and working papers, policy briefs and papers, book and film reviews, review essays, and curated network discussions.
Explore the Issues
The first two issues of the Interdisciplinary Review of ValEUs take up the agenda set out above by examining the centrality of democracy, equality, freedom, solidarity, and the rule of law to the EU’s self-understanding. They ask how, and by whom, these values are defined, what hierarchies they reproduce, and what happens when EU policies fail to live up to the norms they proclaim. Stay tuned for our forthcoming third issue of the IRV, bringing critical perspectives to EU policy debates!
Issue 1: Critical Perspectives on European Values
This inaugural issue grew out of ValEUs’ first academic workshop on “Critical Perspectives on European Values,” held at Université Paris 8 in June 2024. Conceived as a space to develop a constructive critical perspective on European values, the workshop sought to clarify the conceptual foundations of the network’s work by engaging with immanent critique, performativity, and the historical contextualization of European values.
Its discussions made clear that research on European values cannot remain confined to celebratory or purely normative accounts. Instead, it must confront the Eurocentric assumptions that have long structured the field, the contradictions between EU norm-setting and policy practice, and the need to understand values as dynamic and contested rather than static and universally settled. Across disciplines and regional perspectives, participants insisted that European values should be studied as part of a broader geopolitical and historical constellation marked by colonial legacies, asymmetrical power relations, and ongoing processes of reinterpretation.
Edited by the organizers of the Paris workshop, Kolja Lindner (Université Paris 8) and Amelie Kutter (European University Viadrina), the inaugural issue reflects this intellectual orientation, featuring several contributions that revisit the field’s epistemological foundations by questioning concepts that too easily naturalize Europe’s moral and historical centrality.
Belinda Davis examines the long and contradictory history of “the West” as a category of historical thought, showing how the term continues to authorize problematic assumptions of civilizational superiority. Thomas Brisson reconsiders Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, arguing that it should be read less as a rejection of European thought than as a call to rethink modernity in plural and “coeval” terms. Kolja Lindner extends this debate by comparing postcolonial and decolonial approaches and arguing for provincializing Europe rather than delinking from European intellectual traditions, thereby preserving the possibility of dialogue, critique, and shared world-making. Other contributions shift attention to the uneven institutional and political life of values in contemporary Europe and beyond. Laura Leonardi explores solidarity as a key but fractured EU value, contrasting failures in official EU and national migration governance with local practices and making the case for more “cosmopolitanism from below,” as exemplified by the Riace model in Calabria, Italy. Dániel Mikecz analyzes how Hungary’s Viktor Orbán frames Europe, showing how an illiberal political project can appropriate and rework the language of European values for populist mobilization from within the Union itself. Finally, Silvana Insignares-Cera and Mariangela Rueda-Fiorentino examine democracy in EU–Latin American trade relations and show how the democratic clauses embedded in agreements often lose force when economic and strategic interests prevail over consistent implementation.
The issue illustrates how “European values” are not simply norms to be affirmed or rejected, but sites of struggle, selective appropriation, contradiction, and reinvention. It therefore offers not a fixed definition of these values, but a shared commitment to studying them critically, historically, and in relation to one another.
Issue 2: European Values Between External Power and Internal Contestation
Issue 2 of the Interdisciplinary Review of ValEUs gathers work produced across the range of forms the ValEUs network has developed since its founding: from the provocation, a short, deliberately unfootnoted essay intended not to settle argument but to provoke it, to sustained scholarly argument, archival reconstruction, and doctrinal repair. The essays collected here occupy varying distances from that founding form. Several remain provocations in the strict sense; others have since developed into the more extended modes of inquiry named above. This heterogeneity of form is not incidental to the issue’s editorial logic but constitutive of it. It registers, in textual terms, what the provocation as a founding form was for.
Two questions have structured the bulk of the network’s deliberations, and the issue is organized along the axis they describe. The first is directed outward, toward the European Union’s conduct in the world, and is fundamentally decolonial in orientation. What does it signify that a project assembled by former imperial powers narrates its own external conduct in the register of values rather than power, and what does that narration cost those situated on the far side of it? The second question turns inward, toward the Union’s constituent member states, and concerns the persistence of populism. Why does illiberalism continue to secure purchase within a polity whose founding self-description names liberal democracy as constitutive, and whose illiberalism is properly at issue when the charge is made?
Contributions by Mohammed Bamyeh, Jarosław Jańczak, and Mikhail Minakov take up the external question from the vantage points of political theory, EU studies, and international law, respectively, the last through a substantial archival reconstruction of the 1948 Genocide Convention’s drafting history. Timm Beichelt’s essay works across both axes, mapping the scholarly critique of the EU and distinguishing it from the harder Euroscepticism of populist politics. Dániel Mikecz, Ayhan Kaya, and Randall Halle address the internal question through frame analysis, fieldwork, and provocation in turn. Read together, the issue advances the claim that the Union’s difficulties abroad and at home are not separate phenomena but a single contradiction, differently articulated.
