Description
There is a growing sense that world politics stands at a crossroads. Temporal metaphors such as the “return of geopolitics” and “Zeitenwende” have become central to how policymakers and scholars alike articulate this moment. Yet despite its ubiquity, the notion of changing time as a constitutive condition of political action is rarely dwelt upon. Dominant understandings of time in IR – from path dependence in Historical Institutionalism to urgency in Securitization Theory – struggle to capture the distinctiveness of our times, in which time itself, and actors’ place within it, are being fundamentally reworked.
This paper develops a conceptual vocabulary for studying changing times, drawing on Reinhard Koselleck’s work in historiography to distinguish acceleration from urgency. It argues that acceleration better captures the present moment of re-ordering, in which signs of the future world order outpace the present.
Empirically, the paper examines the European Union (EU) as a key site where historical time is constructed and contested. It traces how temporal narratives have been mobilized to interpret and re-time crises and geopolitical events from the global financial crisis and the migration crisis to COVID-19, Trump’s (re-)election, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Long seen as the frontrunner of a futuristic, post-national, liberal world, the EU must make these events intelligible through its understanding of time.
The paper argues that the EU’s evolving timing practices are coalescing into a composite temporal prism through which a “new time” in world politics becomes legible. In this new era, the EU risks becoming the emblem and, indeed, the guardian of an old order that is increasingly out of sync with the times. As temporal horizons shift, so too does the directionality of actors, reshaping who is a progressive, conservative, or reactionary force in world politics.
