Spurred by the recent global economic crisis, Social Innovation (SI) has gained increasing attention in the European Commission (EC) agenda. However, it remains a heterogeneous and ill-defined concept, whose boundaries are unclear. Currently, within EC discussions, it encapsulates a variety of concepts from social enterprises to societal change. Adopting an ethnographic methodology, this analysis provides insight into the contrasting official ‘front-stage’ and ‘back-stage’ views, constraints and practices by which SI has been adopted and promoted by the EC. While the ‘front-stage’ perspective is more intentionally based on the official situations, documents, and statements, the ‘back-stage’ is informed by both the ethnographic analysis and its relationship with the ‘front-stage’ perspective. The main finding of the analysis is that SI might presumably be seen as the only way to align the Commission's conservative-liberal policy, which is rooted in the Lisbon Agenda, with the pressing social demands that stem from the 2008 financial crisis. However, this analysis also indicates that, rather than a novel policy stream, SI can also be seen as a policy compromise that can be used to detract from debates around the need to develop a fully-fledged EU Social Policy; more deeply, it can detract the policy debate from facing a thorough reflection on our society and development model. The analysis here will also provide an overview of the risks associated with current thinking viewed from the perspective of EU players operating in the socio-political domain.

A person’s image of a foreign country is often not related to an actual encounter, but limited and one-sided based on the environment of the person’s native land. Consider, for example, the Russian elite perception of the West in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great’s reign shook Russia’s traditional society and led to the spread of promiscuity and general immorality. Consequently, for many Russians, whether or not they traveled, the West, epitomized by France, was a place of erotic pleasures and easygoing life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century some members of the Russian elite started to question the political system of their native land. For some of them, like Peter Chaadaev, the West stood as a symbol of the ideal political institutions and Russia for the dead end of history.

This special issue demonstrates the strengths of a located approach to transnational memory. The issue focuses intensively on Argentina and Spain, but also makes forays into Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, among other locations. By ‘located’ I do not mean simply ‘local’ – indeed, negotiating the question of the local and its relation to the global is high on the agenda of this special issue. A located approach to transnational memory might take inspiration from the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich’s concept of a ‘politics of location’.1 A politics of location does indeed pay rigorous attention to the local – starting from the intimate terrain of the body – but it situates such attention in relation to other scales: from the regional to the national to the global. While Rich’s essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ does not address the question of memory directly, her famous assertion that ‘a place on the map is also a place in history’ resonates with the stakes of the essays collected here – essays that deal, as does Rich’s ‘Notes’, with the contradictory and intersecting legacies of state-sponsored violence (Ref. 1, p. 212).

Reflecting on the tension between progressives and traditionalists in present-day Egypt, the author surveys comparable conflicts in the European past. In nineteenth-century Britain and Belgium the struggle between liberals and conservatives dominated public life. In eighteenth-century France the progressive forces of the Enlightenment were for a long time in bitter conflict with the traditional defenders of King and Church, until the latter were defeated in the French Revolution. In seventeenth-century England the Puritan Revolution overthrew Stuart absolutism, which was a democratic move, but Cromwell then established his own fundamentalist Republic, which was illiberal. In the sixteenth century Humanists and Protestants were progressive and broke with medieval modes of thought and papal domination, but were opposed by traditional forces around the House of Habsburg and the Counter-reformation, neither party claiming total victory. By the fifteenth century the progressive conciliar movement attempted to democratize the Catholic Church by putting the papal curia under the supreme authority of the general council, an assembly representing Christian people of all nations. This short-lived attempt was foiled by defenders of the traditional papal supremacy.