Within less than a century, Southeastern Europe has turned from the demographically most vital part of Europe into the most “greying” one.The project explores social anxieties and their politicisation in a region, which is paradigmatic and peculiar at the same time. A focus on Southeastern Europe is warranted also for its larger role on the landscape of challenges to Europe: it is here, where EU enlargement and EU geopolitical ambitions face some of their most important challenges (and opportunities). It is also a region of states with weak governance capacity, located in a geostrategic contact, or even conflict zone. Social and political disruption in the Balkans invariably affects the rest of Europe, and Germany in particular. At the same time, the fragmented political and social geography of Southeastern Europe makes the region an interesting ‘laboratory’ of research into the social and political dimensions of aging: demographic behaviour is not uniform, and the age-relevant structures of welfare (such as pension systems) are differently organized. The project thus addresses the Call’s objectives on two levels:

1. it studies dimensions of aging which can be generalized also for other countries;
2. it does so by focussing on a region which in many ways poses challenges to the European project, and where aging increases them.

The project will address the following questions, connected by our premise that aging results in far-reaching anxieties that stimulate certain policies:

• Are demographic nationalism, and xenophobic attitudes (especially towards Muslim immigrants and domestic Roma populations), both prevalent in several Southeast European countries, connected with aging and the fears that it engenders among the public?
• How does aging – and in connection with it, emigration – affect political preferences and voting behaviour, and how do political parties address (stoke) demographic fears?
• What is the framing of aging in media discourses, which metaphors are used, which other fears and challenges are linked to aging in public discourse?
• Which continuities and legacies can be identified in the biopolitics of age in Southeastern Europe, with its distinctive historical experiences, such as of state socialism?

The project will employ multi-disciplinary methods from political science, demography, ethnology, sociology, and history. Research will be organized into comparative caste studies, linked together by the main cross-cutting perspectives (representation, politicization, actors). The focus, therefore, is clearly on the perceptions of demographic processes, of their framing into “problems”, and the political solutions suggested to “solve” these problems. This also helps to understand the political groundwork for justifying concrete political measures (such as reforms of the pension system – a topic already extensively researched per se.). As a collateral project, we will also build a databank on demographic indicators of aging in Southeastern Europe since 1990, mapping also regional breakdowns.