Why These Times Are Different: Time, Crises, and the (Re)making of World Order

There is a growing sense that world politics has entered a moment of fundamental reordering, with the European Union (EU) at its centre. This paper theorizes how the EU makes sense of and situates itself within such times of acceleration. It begins from the observation that temporal metaphors such as the “return of geopolitics” and Zeitenwende have become central to how policymakers and scholars articulate the present moment. Yet despite their ubiquity, the notion of "changing times" as a constitutive condition of political action is rarely dwellt upon. Dominant accounts of time in international relations and EU scholarship, from path dependence in Historical Institutionalism to urgency in Securitization Theory, struggle to capture the distinctiveness of our times, in which time itself, and actors’ place within it, are being fundamentally reworked. Addressing this gap, the paper develops a conceptual vocabulary for studying “changing times” within the EU context. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s work in historiography, it distinguishes acceleration from urgency. I argue that acceleration better captures the current moment of reordering, in which signs of the future outpace the present. Whereas urgency suspends ordinary politics in the hope of returning to the old normal, acceleration signals the arrival of a new normal. Empirically, the paper examines the EU as a key site where historical time is constructed and contested. It traces how EU actors have mobilized temporal narratives to interpret and re-time crises and geopolitical shocks, ranging from the global financial crisis and the migration crisis to COVID 19, Trump’s reelection, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Long portrayed as the frontrunner of a post-national, liberal future, the EU must make these events intelligible through its own temporal self-understanding, which is itself constantly revised. The analysis suggests that the EU’s evolving timing practices are consolidating into a broader temporal prism through which a new time in world politics becomes legible. While the EU has often coped with disruptive events by placing them in the past or isolating them in the present, disruptions are increasingly future-fitted. They are interpreted as signs of an emerging world. In this mode, disruptions do not confirm the past but foreshadow the future. In this new era, the EU risks becoming the emblem and, indeed, the guardian of an old order that is increasingly out of sync with the times. As temporal horizons shift, so too does the directionality of actors, reshaping who is a progressive, conservative, or reactionary force in world politics. EU integration begins to appear as a defensive and conservative project aimed at preserving an old order while simultaneously learning from and mirroring the practices of an emerging geopolitical world. Understanding how the EU navigates historical time and how it situates itself within the past, present, and future of world ordering is, therefore, essential for explaining its foreign policy. The central message of the paper is straightforward: it matters whether crises are understood as relics of the past, short-term disruptions, or signs of the future.