The Goethe-Institut Madrid is organizing “Europe, the Last Utopia of Our Time?”, a panel discussion that, inspired by the thought of Jürgen Habermas, aims to analyze Europe as an evolving political project.
The event will take place in the Europe Pavilion at the Madrid Book Fair on June 2nd at 7:30 pm as part of the Goethe-Institut Madrid lecture series “The Power of Dialogue” on the key concepts of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. On this occasion, we will explore his ideas about Europe together.
The event will be held in Spanish. Admission is free with registration on Eventbrite.
For decades, Habermas maintained that the European project holds a unique political promise: not just a market or a union of states, but an attempt to overcome nationalism through law and democracy. In *The Postnational Constellation*, Habermas describes the European Union as a project aimed at domesticating political power beyond the nation-state.
At the same time, he pointed out its limitations early on, such as the distance between institutions and citizens and the weakness of a genuine European public sphere.
In some of his later public interventions, Habermas emphasized this critique: he spoke of a persistent democratic deficit, the primacy of intergovernmental decisions, and a technocratic management of crises that has weakened European solidarity. Thus, Europe risks falling short of its own aspirations. Europe remains, therefore, an unfinished project: fragile, but open to further democratic deepening.
Carsten Moser, Claudi Pérez, and Aurora Mínguez take up these reflections and turn their attention to the future of European cooperation, underscoring the central role of communication and the media in building a common public sphere.
