Asian Institute of International Financial Law (AIIFL), HKU

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Reimagining Prosperity for the 21st Century: Europe in Search of a New Vision and New Partners

East Asian International Economic Law and Policy (EAIEL) Programme

Date & Time Wednesday, 22 April 2026 12:00-1:00 pm (HKT)
Duration 1:00
Location Room 824, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

In her recent book “Reimagining Prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU” (CUP 2024, open access), Professor Marija Bartl argues that the EU’s central task today is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around an attractive vision, and a credible path, toward future prosperity, making ‘political-economic’ questions the heart of democratic politics. Without a broadly shared (thin) consensus about a viable path to a prosperous future, democratic pluralist societies will face pressures toward disintegration – as we are witnessing today. These disintegration pressures pose a particularly acute challenge for the EU, which is a direct offspring of imaginaries of prosperity that were prevailing after the WW2. In this talk, Professor Bartl will explore an additional crucial question: to what extent must such an imaginary be deliberately global, or at least transnational, given the transnational and planetary scale of the challenges we confront? And what role do the EU, China and ‘middle powers’ across the globe have to play in reimagining prosperity for the 21st century?

About the Speaker

Professor Marija Bartl

Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam Law School

Marija Bartl is Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam Law School. She is also a Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law, editor of European Law Open and a founding co-president of European Law Unbound – Society. Marija has just published an open access monograph "Reimagining Prosperity: Towards a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU" (CUP 2024). This book is one of the outcomes of Marija’s ERC funded project ‘Law as a vehicle for social change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices (N-EXTLAW)’.

Chair

Professor Ying Zhu

AIIFL Fellow and Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong