For decades, the transatlantic relationship has been the unquestioned axis of Europe’s political, cultural, and intellectual orientation. Today, that axis is trembling. The West, once the cornerstone of postwar identity and liberal progress, is losing its grip. This conference takes that rupture as an opportunity to think anew. What if “the West” was never a stable entity but a project built on cultural transfers, political asymmetries, and philosophical blind spots? What happens when its internal contradictions—between dependency and autonomy, cosmopolitanism and domination—come to light?
A Critique of Transatlantic Reason explores the historical, political, and cultural dimensions of this relationship—from postwar Westbindung to Gaullist dreams of sovereignty, from American pop modernity to Europe’s recurrent anti-American reflections. In the broad Kantian sense, “critique” means not rejection but inquiry: an examination of the conditions that made transatlantic reason possible, and of what its current unraveling reveals.
Gathering thinkers across disciplines and generations, the conference seeks to move beyond nostalgia and lament. Instead, it asks how Europe might redefine itself once its mirror in the Atlantic fades—how new intellectual, political, and cultural constellations could emerge from the cracks of the old.
Organizing Comittee
Philipp Felsch (Berlin)
David Höhn (Berlin)
Jan-Werner Müller (Princeton)
Danilo Scholz (Essen)