Everyday Europe and tomorrow’s Europe : is there a future for social transnationalism? : a response to readers

Abstract

We thank our respondents for a set of very interesting commentaries. As with our own text, these thoughts and insights have themselves inevitably been overtaken by events outside our immediate academic control. As we write, the world has been enveloped in a pandemic that apparently strikes at the heart of globalisation (as it was), after a decade in which the growing threat of impending or emergent crises to it has been heavily signalled on all sides. Ironically — in terms of our core concerns — the present crisis, itself a truly global event, clearly intertwines with the mobilities and transactions that most defined our now lost era. A disease that has spread through expansive human travel and unconstrained human interaction has been tackled everywhere with immobility and social lockdown. Most likely, mobilities — and Europe itself — will not be the same after the coronavirus and the new and revised forms of governance it has imposed. Just how different it will be remains to be seen.