The Province of Europe – Anton Jäger and Ivan Krastev in Conversation

It is among the era’s most widely debated books: Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences by Oxford historian and political theorist Anton Jäger.  

This slim monograph tracks a mutation in the political culture of the West, detonated by the 2008 crash and accelerated by a newly digital public sphere. Its mixture of high politicization and low institutionalization has not only addled recent protest movements, it has also had unpredictable consequences for elites, particularly in Europe, as evidenced by the international tumult of the past years. “The end of the end of history” has caught Europe unguarded, reduced to a geopolitical supplicant: a province belonging to the past. Internally, the European Union’s rightward shift has continued unabated, with shocks to party systems from Germany to Italy, while the lines between Europe’s outsiders and insiders are being drawn ever more starkly.

At the Vienna Humanities Festival, Jäger will give a keynote lecture laying out his diagnosis, before being joined by Ivan Krastev, one of Europe’s most incisive observers of contemporary politics, for a conversation that puts his theory to the test.
 
Together, Jäger and Krastev come together to discuss where Europe is heading and how it might self-identify in the coming decades, confronted with the rise of Asia and the gradual fracture of a previously unitary “West.” 
 
The lecture and subsequent conversation between Anton Jäger and Ivan Krastev will be in English.

Anton Jäger teaches the history of political thought and political theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Having earned his PhD at Cambridge, his research centers on populism and the relationship between capitalism and democracy. The New York Times has described his book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences (London: Verso Books, 2026) “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness.”  
           
Ivan Krastev is a political scientist and public intellectual, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and a permanent fellow at the IWM. Among his many publications are Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), After Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (London: Allen Lane, 2019), Is It Tomorrow Yet?: Paradoxes of the Pandemic (London: Penguin, 2022), and Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2026).

The Vienna Humanities Festival was launched in 2016 by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the European debate network Time to Talk (TTT), and the Wien Museum. Since then, it has become one of the annual highlights of Vienna’s cultural calendar.

Under the motto “Agency,” the 2026 edition will once again bring some of the world’s most inspiring thinkers, writers, scholars, and artists to Vienna on the final weekend of September.

Through conversations, lectures, and debates, the festival will explore the political, social, technological, environmental, cultural, and philosophical questions that define our present and shape our future. It invites audiences to bring ideas into the public sphere, broaden their perspectives, and create a space for thought and reflection.

For more information and the full program, visit humanitiesfestival.at.

_{Abbildung vom Vienna Humanities Festival, © IWM Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen}