Introduction - Between collapse, integration and co-transformation: universalist and particularist economic ideas and practices in Europe since the 1970s

This special issue introduction argues that examining universalisms and particularisms sheds new light on European history, particularly since the 1970s. It allows us to assess how universalist and particularist claims to validity have been constructed in contemporary history and how they were used to conceptualize, justify, promote or prevent political and social change. Globalization and neoliberalism are two examples for concepts that were charged with universalist meaning at the time. The introduction also demonstrates that the economy is a particularly interesting field to explore such dynamics and to analyse the genesis and complexity of such concepts; to critically consider the positionality and relativity of universalist and particularist claims; and to scrutinize how universalisms and particularisms interact, how they overlap and challenge one another. Doing so does not just help to study phenomena that are characteristic for the European history of the present since the 1970s, but also to demonstrate that many such ideas have come under a lot of pressure in our own times.