Timothy Snyder: “Contemporary European history can be understood as a series of integrations and disintegrations, continuing before our eyes in the present day. 1914 was not the end of an old Europe, but the continuation of a process of decolonization within Europe itself. 1939 was not a collapse of civilization, but the crowning moment of Soviet and Nazi attempts to colonize Europe from within. The project of European integration known as the EU succeeded as traditional maritime colonialism failed. The revolutions of 1989 allowed European states with different histories of colonialism and decolonialism to join in a single project. Today the EU stands challenged by a deliberate policy of disintegration known as Eurasia; as so many times before, Ukraine is in the middle”.
http://vcrc.org.ua/en/opening_snyder/
Timothy Snyder will deliver his lecture “Europe After 1914: Integrations and Disintegrations” at the opening of the new premises of Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv on 18 October 2014.