Who Counts? Contesting Sovereignty, Identity, ‘the West’ in a Fragmenting Europe and Beyond?

Abstract

In the age of anthropocene, democratic uncertainty, and the reconfiguration of political boundaries, struggles over meaning have become central to contemporary politics. Across Europe and beyond, political actors increasingly contest not only policies and institutions, but the very concepts through which the collective is understood: who “we” are, what counts as legitimate political action, and where the limits of democracy lie. This panel brings together papers that examine these struggles as discursive processes through which identities, ideologies, and normative boundaries are actively produced, challenged, and rearticulated, including competing articulations of the social contract and the obligations, rights, and expectations that bind political communities together. Across different contexts – national (France and Hungary), transnational (international conferences), and supranational (the EU) – the contributions share a concern with how political actors construct and (de)contest chains of equivalence and difference that define “us” and “them,” and how these chains underpin divergent visions of the social contract. Several contributions foreground war and crisis as catalytic moments that intensify struggles over political meaning. In these contexts, geopolitical conflict is not treated merely as an external event, but as a discursive resource through which questions of identity, sovereignty, security, and belonging are renegotiated. Crisis narratives enable the reactivation of fear, protection, and moral urgency, often reinforcing polarizing logics while simultaneously opening space for their contestation and potential rearticulation. Across cases, such moments reveal how the boundaries between mainstream and more radical political positions become increasingly unstable under conditions of heightened uncertainty. At the same time, the panel situates these dynamics within broader transnational and institutional frameworks. It examines how political meaning-making increasingly unfolds beyond the confines of the nation-state, through cross-border networks, shared symbolic spaces, and supranational institutions that claim the authority to define legitimate political language. Whether through the construction of transnational ideological communities or through institutional efforts to regulate acceptable forms of contestation, these arenas play a central role in shaping contemporary struggles over hegemony. Together, the papers show how concepts such as “the right,” “democracy,” “Europe,” or “radicalism” are negotiated across interconnected national, transnational, and supranational contexts, highlighting the complex interplay between inclusion, exclusion, and the management of political conflict in contemporary polities. Altogether, the panel advances a comparative and theoretically informed understanding of how contemporary political actors engage in meaning-making under conditions of uncertainty, polarization, and institutional strain. It demonstrates that struggles over identity, legitimacy, and democracy shape the political. By juxtaposing cases of right-wing mobilization, hegemony struggles, and institutional boundary-setting, the panel sheds light on the dynamic processes through which political concepts are rearticulated – and on the implications of these processes for depolarization, democratic inclusion, and the future of political contestation in Europe.

Title	Details
A New Social Contract Deep in the Anthropocene: Discourse and Emotional Mechanisms in the Building of and Contesting the Illiberal Social Contract	View Paper Details
Who Are ‘We’? Right-Wing Meaning-Making and the Struggle Over Identity in France	View Paper Details
Reimagining What the “Right” Means: The Emerging Transnational Right-Wing Movement as a Hegemony Challenger	View Paper Details
Rearticulating “Us” and “Them”: Challenging Fidesz’s War-Focused Discourse Before the 2026 Elections	View Paper Details
When Feminism Becomes ‘Radical’: Discursive Thresholds and European Legitimacy	View Paper Details