Europe Canada Network

Europe Canada Network (EUCAnet) is a scholarly platform that facilitates knowledge sharing and allows experts to offer a transatlantic perspective on contemporary issues in Europe and Canada. Through successive projects on topics ranging from migration, democracy, to memory politics, we provide a space — open to both experts and the public — where ideas can be exchanged. ECAnet also aims to make scholarly knowledge available and meaningful to the public in times of critical needs for evidence-based knowledge and open public debate. 

Featured projects:

• Issues of populism and its effects on liberal democracies 
• Memory politics

Why tackle Populism and its effects on Liberal Democracy?

Populism has developed into a veritable challenge for Western Europe's established liberal democracies. While populism was a marginal political force in post-war Europe, it has now entered the political mainstream with decisive implications for the performance of liberal, representative democracies. Across the continent, we have growing evidence of populist parties being a major force in dismantling fundamental rights as well as checks and balances on which liberal democracy depends. 

Over the course of 5 years, the research project Populism and its Effects on Liberal Democracy: Minority Rights and Freedom of Speech funded by SSRHC, explores questions of (i) how right-wing populist parties claim to represent the 'voice of the people' and express 'popular sovereignty', and (ii) how right-wing populism, in cases where parties form part of government, affects minority rights. Over the past years, the project has created synergies with the project "Europe-Canada Dialogue on Democracy: Democratic Deficit and the rise of populism", co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, the Centre for Global Studies, Faculty of Law and the Cedar Trees institute at UVic.

Why is memory politics important? 

Today, we are at a critical turning point in regards to how we remember and commemorate the past. 

In Europe, debates over collective memories of 20th-century traumas (e.g. the World Wars, facism, the Holocaust, colonialism, and the legacy of communism and the Cold War divide) and populists's appeals to 'the people' have challenged Europes' democratic culture and the project of integration. 

In Canada, the process of Indigenous reconciliation and truth-telling has brought questions of collective memory and public history to the forefront of contemporary political debate. Now, more than ever, Canadians are left to confront disparities between national mythologies (e.g. being a tolerant, welcoming people) and realities of genocide, historical injustices, and continuing harm.

Through talks, research, teaching materials, and an expert database, we hope to contribute to these critical scholarly and public debates on memory politics.

Our projects European Memory Politics: Populism, Nationalism, and the Challenges to a European Memory Culture and European and North American Perspectives on Commemorating and Addressing Past Injustices are co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Ottawa.

For more information visit the EUCAnet website at: https://www.eucanet.org/