Description

In my recent book “Reimagining Prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU” (CUP 2024, open access), I argue that the EU’s central task today is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around an attractive vision, and a credible path, toward future prosperity, making ‘political-economic’ questions the heart of democratic politics. Without a broadly shared (thin) consensus about a viable path to a prosperous future, democratic pluralist societies will face pressures toward disintegration – as we are witnessing today. These disintegration pressures pose a particularly acute challenge for the EU, which is a direct offspring of imaginaries of prosperity that were prevailing after the WW2. In this talk, I will explore an additional crucial question: to what extent must such an imaginary be deliberately global, or at least transnational, given the transnational and planetary scale of the challenges we confront? And what role Asian countries can and should play in reimagining prosperity for the 21st century?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Marija is Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam Law School. She is also a Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law, the editor of European Law Open and a founding Co-president of European Law Unbound – Society. Marija has just published an open access monograph ‘Reimagining Prosperity: Towards a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU’ (CUP 2024). This book is one of the outcomes of Marija’s ERC funded project ‘Law as a vehicle for social change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices (N-EXTLAW)’.