The future of the European Union (EU) has become a contested and contingent terrain. While the teleological assumption of an ’ever closer union’ has been prevalent even during previous periods of difficulties and disagreements in the history of the EU, at the current conjuncture it appears that the EU might well be facing a perfect storm. Multiple crises engendered by, amongst other factors, the Eurozone architecture and a related social crisis aggravated by years of austerity governance across the EU, migration patterns and a refugee crisis that challenge the very normative foundations of the Union, the politics of Brexit, and an upsurge of far-right discourses and illiberal politics, have put into sharp relief
that the future of European integration is in fact very much open-ended.

But just how do we think about these multiple, contingent futures? Which trajectories for European integration are thinkable; which ones have not yet been thought? Can fiction help us explore the horizon of the possible for Europe and the EU? Is the future of Europe irrevocably tied to the future of European integration? Which discursive and semiotic shifts do we see when disintegration rather than integration has become de rigeur in academic and public debates (e.g. Patomäki 2017)? Which pathways are there to think about the future when, as De Vries suggests (2018), integration might increasingly be rooted in the
principle of flexibility? And at a time when even the European Commission dabbles in scenario-based futurism (European Commission 2017), just whose visions of future integration are being heard, contested and/or silenced?

This conference offers an international platform for critical and constructive engagement with these, and related questions. There has recently been a distinct turn towards an engagement with future expectations and imaginaries within the social sciences. Economic sociology highlights how fictional expectations drive modern economics and politics (Beckert 2016; Andersson 2018); political economy discusses the economy as a series of fictions and science fiction as a means of anticipating alternative economic futures (Davies 2018). Science fiction has fruitfully been employed side by side with social science as imaginaries or a post-capitalist future (Frase 2016). While the European Union has long been curiously absent in speculative fiction, alternative history and science fiction (a few exceptions aside, mainly depicting a dystopian trajectory), we have in recent years witnessed a significant increase in fictional engagements with the future of the EU and Europe (e.g. Hutchinson; Porcaro; Hvorecký). It seems pertinent to bring the discussion of fictional future imaginaries out of the confines of space policy (e.g. Köpping Athanasopoulos 2017) into a broader debate of thinking about the shape of Europe and the EU to come.