Europe’s Late-Modern ‘Syspondia’: A Genus Reduction

Europe’s Late-Modern ‘Syspondia’: A Genus Reduction

Dimitris N. Chryssochoou

Professor of Theory and Institutions of European Integration,
Department of Political Science and Public Administration, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

What does it mean, and take, for a cluster of ‘politeiai’ to form and, crucially, sustain a union for their collective symbiosis, even to combine into a larger ‘politeia’? How to construe such a demanding exercise through new conceptual lenses? An attempt to an answer in what follows is through the lens of ‘syspondia’; a bond shared among diverse coevolving parts to a political association, each forming a unity of its own but all aspiring to a shared life as in Europe’s late-modern ‘syspondia’.

* The article draws from a public talk on ‘Ancient Greek words for a late-modern union?’ delivered at the Institute for European Studies of the University of Malta on 19 December 2019. The argument is developed further in Politeilogia of unions (in Greek, I. Sideris Publishers, 2020). The author expresses his warmest thanks to his colleagues Georgios L. Evangelopoulos and Andreas Gofas from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Charilaos Platanakis from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Dario Castiglione from the University of Exeter for their constructive comments. The article was submitted in July 2021.