Europe from Its Margins: Georgia and the Making of Modern Europe

Europe is commonly narrated from its historical centers. Political ideas, cultural innovation, and modernity itself are assumed to originate in places such as Paris, London, or Berlin before spreading to the continent's margins. Georgia usually appears in this narrative, if at all, as a distant periphery whose history merely reflects developments elsewhere.

This lecture argues that such a view is historically misleading. Rather than treating Georgia as Europe's edge, it proposes to read it as one of the places from which Europe's history becomes newly intelligible. Revisiting the invention of "Eastern Europe," Georgia's democratic experiments of the early twentieth century, the multilingual urban culture and avant-garde of Tbilisi, and the shared but uneven legacy of 1989, the lecture examines how supposedly peripheral experiences challenge established narratives of European modernity.

The aim is neither to "include" Georgia in an already existing European story nor simply to correct a geographical blind spot. Rather, the lecture argues that Europe's history itself changes once it is reconstructed from places long regarded as peripheral. Georgia thus emerges not as an exception but as a vantage point from which the cultural and political history of modern Europe can be reconsidered.

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Zaal Andronikashvili is Professor of Cultural Studies at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. A literary scholar and cultural historian, he has spent much of his career situating Georgia within broader European and global histories while rethinking those histories from the vantage point of Georgia. His work explores empire, modernity, multilingualism, and the cultural legacies of the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, with particular attention to the South Caucasus. Rather than treating the region as a footnote to a European story told elsewhere, he argues that Georgia offers a distinctive vantage point from which to challenge conventional narratives of center and periphery. He has published widely in German, English, and Georgian.