A Speech to Europe 2025: “Migration and Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century”

In this year’s Speech to Europe at Vienna’s Judenplatz, Lea Ypi will address the complex relationship between citizenship, voting rights, and migration. She will illustrate how the rise of far-right parties across Europe is closely linked to a regressive interpretation of citizenship and reflect on ways to counter the related manipulation of the migration discourse.
 
Since 2019, the Speech to Europe, initiated by ERSTE Foundation, has been delivering fundamental reflections on Europe’s present and future. It takes place at Vienna’s Judenplatz, as a reminder that Europe can only be understood against the shadow of its history. Following the American historian Timothy Snyder, the Ukrainian human rights activist Oleksandra Matviitchuk, and the Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm, this year’s Speech to Europe is held by Albanian-British political scientist and philosopher Lea Ypi.

Lea Ypi is a professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her areas of expertise include contemporary political theory, German idealism (including Kant and Marx), and the intellectual history of the Balkans. She has received several awards for her academic work, including a British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science. In 2022, she was named one of the world’s Top 10 Thinkers by Prospect Magazine. Her philosophical memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin, 2021), which explores her childhood in Albania during the final stages of communism, has been translated in more than thirty-five languages and won several awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize. A native of Albania, she lives and works in London and has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza as well as a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence.