The article analyses the problem of using European constitutional heritage in the practice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Latvia when interpreting the Constitution of the Republic of Latvia. The author analyses several judgments of the Constitutional Court of Latvia, wherein the Court refers to European legal heritage, when interpreting separate norms of the Constitution of the Republic of Latvia. Such practice is particularly evident in two categories of cases. The influence (...) of European legal heritage is most clearly expressed in cases where the Court ascertains the essence of the continuity doctrine and when interpreting human rights enshrined in the Constitution (the Satversme). The author notes that constitutional courts reveal two tendencies. On the one hand, a constitutional court cannot ignore the international context. European courts are influenced by European Union law and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. On the other hand, constitutional court judges in every country have sworn to be loyal to the national constitution and thus have a duty to exercise constitutional control. These tendencies are not necessarily objectionable. On the contrary–knowledge of the international legal context helps the Constitutional Court exercise its mission. (shrink)

This paper draws out what Derrida’s work—in particular as concerns law, democracy, and intergenerational justice in the context of the European heritage—can contribute to constitutionalism and the legal relation to future people, at the national level and the supranational one of the European Union. The first section outlines some of Derrida’s contributions to legal scholarship and European identity, and then, in the following two sections, argue for two main points. First, Derrida can help us understand the (...) much-discussed double bind of the constitutional relation to future people as merely an instance of a more general aporia. The double bind consists in the fact that the constitutional promise to safeguard future freedom also limits and binds future people. I will show how this aporia results from the temporal structure of the constitutional founding of law. Accordingly, the double bind cannot be resolved, either conceptually or in constitutional practice, but only be negotiated with greater awareness. Second, the same aporia of time entails that future generations are already implicated in the founding and re-founding of law here and now. Because the present moment is constitutively related to the past and the future, the meaning of a constitutional founding can become legible only from the future. Hence, the present generation, whose unity is never given, cannot but draw an advance credit on the future whose cooperation it anticipates. As a result, the political promise of Europe depends on its relation to its geographical, but also to its temporal others. (shrink)

Each society is marked by a selective cultural memory which, beside events and traditions whose importance is emphasized, is also constituted by its parts and contents whose influence is either diminished or forgotten. Our society, too is marked by such kind of memory, with obvious reduction, value opposition and, in sum, general duality within the reception of cultural memory, which is always more complex than it appears in political speeches mother-tongue reading books or history textbooks. For this reason, an examination (...) of construction and reception of cultural memory, with an emphasis on traditions of Enlightenment and Romanticism, stems from a necessity to answer a set of questions regarding the contemporary relation to the past, the way "distance" or "proximity" to the latter is constituted, and especially the way in which contemporary practices mark, change and make use of cultural history. Starting from the assumptions that shaping cultural history, its heritage and "memory" is closely connected to the beginnings of nation-building and that cultural memory is a never-ending political process it is my intention in this research project to examine the rivalry juxtapositions, "interruptions" and new foundations of traditions, focusing on the interdependent relation of Enlightenment and Romanticist strands, and particularly on their unmarked, empty spots. Just as cultural memory is a result of two opposed processes - foregrounding and oblivion - so this research is similarly devoted to a double and apparently paradoxical task. On one hand, the accent is on the resurrection and reinforcement of integrative segments of these traditions which, at the time of their emergence as well as in subsequent interpretations, were mostly neglected. On the other hand there is the need to keep pace with what is required by the current "acceleration of time", which amounts to nothing else but the necessity to forget. Briefly put, the aim is to point to disciplinary-interdependent, more nuances and more communicative ways of viewing these relations, which would diminish the exclusivist and profound opposition within the contemporary reception of the traditions examined. (shrink)

This inquiry examines various philosophical conceptions of identity and the clash between different identity narratives in the history of philosophy. The main goal of this paper is to show how the European philosophical idea of identity was developed. This paper explores the emergence of European philosophical identity narratives, which have shaped the ideas of justice, truth and community in Europe. It studies the foundational identity narratives that underlie the contested idea of a shared European heritage in (...) law and culture, such as the ideas of equality, tolerance, rule of law, pluralism and the rejection of totalitarianism, and their relevance for current debates on philosophical ideas of self and identity. Identity is an open process. It is a dynamic hermeneutic category, which is constantly reinterpreted and reinvented. There are various philosophical traditions of Cogito – some of them perceive it as foundation of all knowledge and some of them perceive it as a mere illusion. In all these philosophical perspectives, the self is understood only through interpretation. The self is constituted as a narrative, as a text. Understanding oneself means understanding oneself in front of a text. The self is reinterpreted all over again only in light of narratives provided by culture. The task of hermeneutics is not only understanding of a subject, but also rethinking the subject. (shrink)

This article attempts to define, beyond the normative aspects, what heritage education exemplifies today. It seeks to understand how heritage education and cultural mediation can contribute to the affirmation of identity and individualization among young people and, by analogy, reduce inequalities of access to cultural practices, otherwise called cultural democracy, in which the school plays a pivotal role. It is, therefore, necessary to discuss the interest of this educational practice not only within the framework of schools, but also (...) outside to ensure that all students have equal access to their own culture. The present article addresses the main question on how heritage education and its concrete projects constitute an effective tool—one that is conducive to cultural equalities and democracy. Also included in this conception is a project, initiated by the Majorelle Garden Foundation in Marrakech, Morocco, which helped lend public school students the necessary tools to assimilate the notions of history, art, and culture during their visits to museums to promote education of the gaze through a cognitive and sensitive approach. (shrink)

Each society is marked by a selective cultural memory which, beside events and traditions whose importance is emphasized, is also constituted by its parts and contents whose influence is either diminished or forgotten. Our society, too is marked by such kind of memory, with obvious reduction, value opposition and, in sum, general duality within the reception of cultural memory, which is always more complex than it appears in political speeches mother-tongue reading books or history textbooks. For this reason, an examination (...) of construction and reception of cultural memory, with an emphasis on traditions of Enlightenment and Romanticism, stems from a necessity to answer a set of questions regarding the contemporary relation to the past, the way "distance" or "proximity" to the latter is constituted, and especially the way in which contemporary practices mark, change and make use of cultural history. Starting from the assumptions that shaping cultural history, its heritage and "memory" is closely connected to the beginnings of nation-building and that cultural memory is a never-ending political process it is my intention in this research project to examine the rivalry juxtapositions, "interruptions" and new foundations of traditions, focusing on the interdependent relation of Enlightenment and Romanticist strands, and particularly on their unmarked, empty spots. Just as cultural memory is a result of two opposed processes - foregrounding and oblivion - so this research is similarly devoted to a double and apparently paradoxical task. On one hand, the accent is on the resurrection and reinforcement of integrative segments of these traditions which, at the time of their emergence as well as in subsequent interpretations, were mostly neglected. On the other hand there is the need to keep pace with what is required by the current "acceleration of time", which amounts to nothing else but the necessity to forget. Briefly put, the aim is to point to disciplinary-interdependent, more nuances and more communicative ways of viewing these relations, which would diminish the exclusivist and profound opposition within the contemporary reception of the traditions examined. (shrink)

The current environmental crisis can be approached, through many perspectives, as a civilizational crisis. Alternatives of human transcendence are identified in the Inca civilization to compensate for the malaise that characterizes the actual crisis. There is a multicultural dimension to the manifestations of Hoasca occurring in Amazonian countries. As employed by the Beneficent Spiritist Center União do Vegetal in a religious context, it can contribute to the reconstruction of buen vivir, which served as the principle of the civilizations that preceded (...) the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. Today, the State openly confronts the manifestation of the constitutional principles of buen vivir, religious freedom, and the protection of this cultural heritage. Here, the implications of the civilizational crisis and ways of overcoming it are approached from the standpoint of deep ecology, but the implications also reflect the doctrinal vision of the UDV to which the authors are affiliated. (shrink)

In several European countries former pupils of Catholic nuns have made accusations of physical and emotional abuse. Feminist scholars have tended to perceive nuns as heroines because of their authority and their contribution to raising the social status of women. But there is also a darker side to convent education. Committees established by national governments have identified systemic factors leading to abuse in educational institutions. This article argues that these factors should include a feminist theological explanation: a dualistic, sacrificial (...) spirituality underpinned the Rules of charitable orders and influenced the nuns’ blurred understanding of what constitutes humane treatment. Supporting evidence is drawn from testimonies of privileged pupils of convent boarding schools in the 1910s, from stories of ex-nuns who fled the convent, and from nuns who openly acknowledged the problem during Post Vatican II renewal when at last they were able to revolt against their spiritual value-systems. (shrink)

Lenin, the great teacher of the proletariat, was deeply concerned with both the development of socialist literature and the problem of the correct critical acceptance of the literary heritage by the proletariat. Lenin frequently spoke of the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Shchedrin, Chekov, and others. Among the western European classical authors he particularly respected Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Hugo, Dickens, and Zola. In the brilliant classical writings which Lenin has left us he frequently made use (...) of artistic images, first molded in classical literary works, with which the people were familiar in order to expound problems of a theoretical nature. Furthermore he used them as tools for carrying on ideological education for the people. For example, in his writings Materialism and Empiriocriticism, and "The Marxist Critics and the Land Question," he used the image of Voroshilov, the false man of learning in Turgenev's novel Smoke, to elucidate a problem; he used the satirical images of bourgeois liberals from Shchedrin to reveal the basic nature of the enslavement and oppression of the people by the reactionary party, and so on. In addition, Lenin has left us in his works many incisive views directly related to the problem of the critical acceptance of the literacy heritage. They constitute an indivisible part of Lenin's theoretical estate. To study new Lenin's theories on the problem of the critical acceptance of the literacy heritage can be of great help to us today for our own correct treatment of the classical literacy heritage. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the genuinely philosophical engagement with the idea of Europe twentieth century philosophy. Here, especially phenomenology has developed a distinct tradition of conceiving Europe not as a geographical and political entity but rather as a ‘spiritual shape.’ Husserl, as the originator of this thought, traces this spiritual Europe back to Ancient Greece of the 7/6 century B.C. in which an unprecedented ‘theoretical attitude’ towards the world originated. Hence, Europe is conceived as a project of reason, of pure rationality (...) while at the same time leaving out the constitutive dimension of religion. Furthermore, this non-historical philosophical genealogy proves itself to be an arbitrary but intentional genealogy whose intentions have to be put into critical reconsideration. In this article, I will introduce Patočka and Zambrano as important critiques of Husserl’s genealogy, or even potentially violent mono-genealogy, as Derrida has emphasized. Following Foucault, it is the aim of this article to put into question the myth of a single historical-political origin of Europe’s spiritual heritage and furthermore to pay attention to the transformations and conflictual relations between Europe’s different forms of reason and religion. (shrink)

Contemporary Europe is facing this chal- lenge when redefining its own identity and socializing institutions. This paper focuses on how current discus- sions on the adequacy of a reference to Judeo- Christian heritage in the new European Constitution or on the teaching of religions at schools show the resilience of old-age notions and stereotypes with respect to cultural diversity. In order to explain this resilience, the paper explores how hierarchical percep- tions of otherness (mainly of Muslims) are flourishing (...) within a dichotomized system of representing other- ness. This system is analyzed from the neo- Durkeimian perspective of cultural sociology and placed in connection with the spiritual leadership of fundamentalist conservatism after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the old trend of Orientalism underlying pervading dominant Western discourses. (shrink)

When, on December 7, 2000, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission proclaimed solemnly in Nice the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, many thought that European integration was practically guaranteed and that the Charter would soon be made into a binding legal text. Since then, the two attempts to enact a European consitution – the Constitutional Treaty for the European Union of 2004 and the arguably less ambitious Treaty of Lisbon (...) of 2007 – both failed. Further efforts at unification have stagnated, in part due to the 2008 economic crisis and the European Union’s inability to coordinate responses to issues as serious as immigration, the refugee crisis, and terrorism. In this paper, I examine a theoretical counterpoint to that bleak perspective for European unification, to wit, Jürgen Habermas’ eurofederalist proposal of the postnational democracy and European constitutional patriotism. (shrink)

The recent proposition to eliminate eponyms from physical publications is discussed. The role of eponyms in research and education is analyzed. We show that eponyms constitute an integral part of physical texts and ensure the continuity of scientific research. Their proposed elimination is dangerous for science and the entire human culture and must be rejected.

If the task of constitutional theory is to set out a language in which the discourse of constitutional law may be grounded, a question of the utmost importance is how this terminology is created, defined and interpreted. In this groundbreaking new work, András Jakab maps out and analyses the grammar and vocabulary on which the core European traditions of constitutional theory are based. He suggests understanding key constitutional concepts as responses to historical and present day (...) challenges experienced by European societies. Drawing together a great and diverse range of literature, much of which has never before been touched upon by scholarship in the English language, Jakab reconceptualises and argues for a new understanding of European constitutional law discourse. In so doing he shines new light on what constitutes its distinctively European nature. This remarkable book is essential reading for all scholars and students of constitutional theory in Europe and beyond. (shrink)

Is the dream of EU endangered? This book reviews classic and modern values and virtues, and uses them in order to rethink Europe's present politics and its future. The idea of the Republic was born with the political ethics of ancient Greece. The current international crisis obliges Europe to face the mirror of truth: What has become of the European Idea and how fares the European Constitution? It has been a long road from the Greek Politeia to the (...) present lack of values and financial monomania in Europe, who seems to have lost any harmony between the spirit, the soul and the body of her Constitution: the will and values of the people (material constitution), the text of the Lisbon Treaty (formal constitution) and its current political interpretation and action (real constitution), making Europe a two-tier or three-tier club, far from the dream of the founding fathers. Without republican values and virtues, and failing to uphold the European social model, the European Union would devolve into moral, social and democratic bankruptcy. (shrink)

When, on December 7, 2000, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission proclaimed solemnly in Nice the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, many thought that European integration was practically guaranteed and that the Charter would soon be made into a binding legal text. Since then, the two attempts to enact a European consitution - the Constitutional Treaty for the European Union of 2004 and the arguably less ambitious Treaty of Lisbon (...) of 2007 - both failed. Further efforts at unification have stagnated, in part due to the 2008 economic crisis and the European Union’s inability to coordinate responses to issues as serious as immigration, the refugee crisis, and terrorism. In this paper, I examine a theoretical counterpoint to that bleak perspective for European unification, to wit, Jürgen Habermas’ eurofederalist proposal of the postnational democracy and European constitutional patriotism. (shrink)

Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae is not a new document. It was published almost twenty years ago – in 1990. Nevertheless it seems that it’s not very well known in Poland. Although it is mainly addressed to Catholic universities, one has to admit that it gives insightful description of academic world’s nature in general. This constitution recalls basic objectives and calling of academia. Ex Corde Ecclesiae is an important voice that speaks about the mission and identity (...) of university, which can be understood in two perspectives. First – in European dimension – it reminds us where Old Continent’s intellectual heritage and achievements come from. Secondly – in our Polish perspective – Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae – may be a valuable signpost for our developing and reforming academic world, which not always seems to understand its identity and mission properly. (shrink)

Any abstract account of a field of law must make generalizations that are both faithful to the legal materials and appropriate to the subject matter's aims. The uniqueness and fluidity of the European Union's institutions makes such generalizations very difficult. A common theoretical approach to EU law (one that is often relied upon by the Court of Justice, the Parliament and the Commission) is to borrow directly from the theory of domestic constitutional law. The most recent manifestation of (...) this tendency is the draft Treaty on the European Constitution, which includes many of the symbolic features of a domestic constitutional order. But the European Union is not a state and the constitutional analogy is in many ways problematic. In this article I defend the view that a more complex theory is more appropriate to the unique combination of ordinary politics with diplomatic conferences that constitutes the European Union. The key to these institutions is, in my view, a Kantian international ideal of liberal peace. The foundational constitutional principles of the EU, principles that both fit the current legal framework and offer its most attractive interpretation, require the qualified autonomy of member states in a union of republics that create collective institutions for the purposes of liberal peace. (shrink)

In 1933, the year that Hitler took power in Germany, Martin Heidegger accepted the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg. Rectoral Address is selected for its pertinence to this period of European history, which remains so central to the understanding of what constitutes Europe's heritage. This chapter explores the relationship between the sociopolitical events that took place in Germany in 1933 and philosophical texts relating to them. It provides some contextualisation of the post‐war events that ensued from Heidegger's (...) Address and political decisions in terms of the re‐reading of his philosophy and the Heidegger affair. Karl Liowith's account gives a positive interpretation of Heidegger's work, in the sense of situating him within a lineage of European philosophers who responded to the decline of Europe, diagnosing and responding to its nihilism, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is followed by an introduction to Heidegger's Being and Time and subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper proposes an analysis of the European Constitution from the perspective of its conditions of possibility. The focus is on the conditions that subtend the European constitution, the conditions, the premises that make the European Constitution possible. In the present context of discourse “possibility” is understood in the sense of Kantian critique. But here critique is based on Reasonableness rather than on Reason—in fact a thesis orienting this essay is that the human being to survive and (...) to survive well must quickly change from a rational animal into a reasonable animal. Is the European constitution possible? Where must we search for the necessary conditions that support the European constitution (1) in common historical and cultural traditions, in common practices, in common social behaviours or (2) merely in a shared decision, an accord, a contract, a convention? There exists a third possibility: the idea that Europe has no future without a European constitution founded on awareness that all European Nations participate in a common destiny, which in the era of globalization is the destiny the whole world, indeed of life over the whole planet. Such participation must be based on the logic of otherness and reasonableness of which the human being alone as a semiotic animal is capable. As a semiotic animal, that is, an animal capable of metasemiosis, reflection and critical consciousness, the human being is responsible for all of life over the planet. (shrink)

Habermas’s interventions in German political affairs gave rise to the concept of constitutional Patriotism. His earlier theoretical work did not revisit the idea in any distinct manner. Moral Consciousness, I argue, has traces of a legal identity and universal morality. While interpreting Kohlberg’s work, Habermas did not seek to tie the concept of citizenship or political identity into his account of Moral Consciousness. The concepts of political identity and a legal orientation come up, more recently and in a clearly (...) observable manner, in Habermas’s writings on Europe. His writings and speeches delivered on the idea of Europe before the Eurozone crises as well as those published and delivered after the crises refer to a strong sense of Constitutional Patriotism understood in the European sense. It is this idea that I would like to dwell on in this paper. (shrink)

In various European countries, the relation between `the left' and `the right' presents itself today in paradoxical form: the attenuation of the differences at the level of policy making is accompanied by the persistence, if not even strengthening, of the polarisation in terms of verbal position taking and of partisan self-description. To understand this situation, one needs to return to that which constitutes the ideological core of the opposition between left and right. The left remains marked, though not necessarily (...) in an explicit fashion, by the heritage of the quest for `total revolution'. Such quest presupposes a radical critique of the world in the form in which it presents itself, namely as an obstacle to the full realisation of humanity. In this sense, the left is intrinsically connected to critique, and left and right stand opposed to each other in the same way that critique is opposed to celebration. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the critique of the left was elaborated in particular in the form of a social critique of capitalism. Since the 1970s and 1980s, and since the end of communism in particular, the theme of total revolution, however, dissociates itself more and more from the idea of social revolution to focus instead on the idea of sexual revolution. Certain problems that the left encounters today stem from the fact that it amalgamates two highly different kinds of expectation and of critiques. On the one hand, there are the social concerns and the critiques of capitalism, which, however, are no longer oriented towards total revolution. On the other hand, there are expectations that are still turned towards total revolution, but have been shifted towards the exigency of a revolution in the order of reproduction and of sexuality and, thus, have dissociated themselves from the critique of capitalism. (shrink)

The 2007 Treaty settlement represents an attempt by national leaders to banish the language of constitutionalism from the EU reform project for a generation. This book argues that the constitutional question cannot and should not disappear so easily. Examining the Union's constitutional past, and the prospects of constitutionalism providing a 'thicker' language of values for the future, the book provides a thorough analysis of the continuing role of constitutional thought in the EU's search for legitimacy as the (...) world's first post-state polity. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a business ethics case from the viewpoint of discursive ethics. Dialogue and subsequent agreement constitute two key ideas of European identity and are two basic concepts of discursive ethics thinking. Our choice for this type of approach was determined by several reasons, of which there are three that should be pointed out, as they can be considered an heritage of the European way of thinking:1) the need for a rational (...) dialogue, in which all those affected -- or, failing that, the people acting in their name -- are represented, as a way to find solutions to conflicts;2) the importance of respecting a set of conditions ensuring equal opportunities and total symmetry among the participants; and3) obliged respect for the universalization principle, which establishes that a decision is morally correct when it can or could be accepted by all those whom it affects, present or future.In order to present this case, the following steps are taken. Firstly, a brief summary of the case will be provided, defining the different ways of approaching the problem and the resulting map of interests. Secondly, the different interests and values, which came into play, are analysed. Finally, we go over the different approaches that were made to reach a solution before considering dialogue, which turned out to be the most decisive. (shrink)

How to accommodate diverse religious practices and laws within a secular framework is one of the most pressing and controversial problems facing contemporary European public order. In this provocative contribution to the subject, Lorenzo Zucca argues that traditional models of secularism, focusing on the relationship of state and church, are out-dated and that only by embracing a new picture of what secularism means can Europe move forward in the public reconciliation of its religious diversity.The book develops a new model (...) of secularism suitable for Europe as a whole. The new model of secularism is concerned with the way in which modern secular states deal with the presence of diversity in the society. This new conception of secularism is more suited to the European Union whose overall aim is to promote a stable, peaceful and unified economic and political space starting from a wide range of different national experiences and perspectives. The new conception of secularism is also more suited for the Council of Europe at large, and in particular the European Court of Human Rights which faces growing demands for the recognition of freedom of religion in European states. The new model does not defend secularism as an ideological position, but aims to present secularism as our common constitutional tradition as well as the basis for our common constitutional future. (shrink)

Event synopsis: The conference becomes a major academic event for republican studies in Russia and a meeting point with the leading European scholars in this field. In recent decades republicanism has become one of the central concerns in political theory and history, with studies exploring both republicanism as ‘a shared European heritage’ and reviving republican political thought to contribute to current debates on issues such as freedom, citizenship, equality, governance and international relations. Republicanism has been the topic (...) of many seminars at the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) and the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. This time the conference focuses on the history of republican institutions, both in terms of ‘political thought’ and ‘cultural practices’. The emphasis of the conference is on the study of late medieval, early-modern and modern republican debates in Europe and North-Western Russian regions. The conference explores the institutional structures of city-republics in comparative perspective as well as the dynamics of relations between these entities in terms of cultural and intellectual exchange. The cross-cultural and comparative perspective of the conference asks for studies focusing on the transfers of knowledge and practices between city-republics and other regional powers, their shared heritage and diverging cultural and national trajectories. The conference wants to explore a variety of topics related to the functioning of economic, legal and political institutions devised to sustain non-authoritarian regimes. These can include studies of material artifacts and official documentation as well as studies of republican political thought reflecting on the internal constitution of republics and the differences with the ‘despotic’ governments. An important aim of the conference is to set up a new research network, bringing together scholars from different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, including diverse strands of history, conceptual history and political theory. The aim is to initiate a systematic comparison of Western, Northern and Eastern European republics at conceptual and institutional levels. (shrink)

The defeat of the Constitutional Treaty by French and Dutch voters in 2005 and the following stalemate of the Lisbon Treaty have sparked a soul-searching process for European constitutional scholarship. Among the numerous academic efforts devoted to contemplating the future of European constitution, Michelle Everson and Julia Eisner's The Making of a European Constitution: Judges and Law Beyond Constitutive Power deserves a close look. Everson and Eisner argue for a postconstituent view of European constitutionalization, (...) which they call ‘Rechtsverfassungsrecht’. Departing from the myth of the constituent power, they interpret the development of a European constitution as a self-creating process by which the ordinary legal system gives itself a set of core values and thereby remakes itself into a constitutional order. Moreover, against the criticisms of juridification, they defend this lawyer-centred process of European constitutionalization as incorporating politics into the daily operation of the legal system. Engaging with Everson and Eisner's argumentation, I argue that their account of European constitutional development does not so much put out a realist theory of the EU constitutionalization as sets out a realist academic lawyering for the next round of European constitutional politics, which is shared among European constitutional scholars. Contrasting this community-based legal profession in Europe with the situation of epistemic pluralism in American jurisprudence, in this article I observe that a lawyer-centred European constitutional theory as Everson and Eisner's book illustrates is premised on an inherited consensus that has held a European legal profession together. However, this lawyer-centred account of European constitutionalization presumes either the projection of a professional community onto a Europe-wide civic culture or the self-appointment of legal professionals as the fiduciary of the citizenry. Each is a fiction, however. This fictional character of the legalist-constructivist strategy to European constitutional politics is the underlying cause of the dilemma facing European constitutional ordering. (shrink)

This article investigates how voters made sense of the Dutch EU constitutional referendum. Based on a series of focus group interviews, it identifies what information people based their understandings on, and traces the relations they draw between concepts in their own accounts of their vote choices. Applying a cognitive connectionist perspective on the construction of meaning, it models people's considerations as paths across semantic networks. It finds that people shared considerable parts of the knowledge underlying their constructions, but used (...) this information quite differently. They strategically selected frames from their information environment, and reframed contrary arguments to fit their constructions. Yes- and No-voters drew in systematically different additional information, while simultaneously engaging idiosyncratic concerns to personalize their accounts. People's understandings are thus informed and constrained, but by no means determined, by public discourse. Highlighting people's activity and creativity, this paper calls for a stronger audience perspective in political communication research. (shrink)

To investigate the unique kinds of mentality involved in skilled performance, this paper explores the performance ecology of the Māori haka, a ritual form of song and dance of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. We respond to a recent proposal to program robots to perform a haka as ‘cultural preservationists’ for ‘intangible cultural heritage’. This ‘Robot Māori Haka’ proposal raises questions about the nature of skill and the transmission of embodied knowledge; about the cognitive and affective experiences (...) cultivated in indigenous practices like haka; and about the role of robots in the archival aspirations of human societies. Reproducing haka, we suggest, requires more than copying physical actions; preserving the ‘intangible’ entails more than programming postures and movements. To make this case, we discuss the history of European responses to the haka, and analyse its diverse performance features in cultural context. Arguing that indigenous movement practices incorporate genuinely embodied knowledge, we claim that skilled performance of haka is deeply mindful, embodying and transmitting dynamic, culturally shared understandings of the natural and social world. The indigenous psychologies incorporated in haka performance are animated by a shared history integrated with its environment. Examining haka performance through the lens of 4E cognitive skill theory for mutual benefit, we discuss the effects of synchrony in collective action, the social and environmental scaffolding of affect and emotion, and the multilayered relations between past and present. Culturally-embedded systems of skilled movement like the Māori haka may, we suggest, constitute specific ways of thinking and feeling. (shrink)

The Schuman Plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the Benelux countries, France, Germany, and Italy, but the United Kingdom declined to participate, refusing to accept the supranational role of the projected High Authority. The treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was signed in Paris on 18 April 1951. The European Economic Community (EEC) has provided the core framework for the process of European integration. The Single European Act (SEA) also inserted into the EEC Treaty (...) a number of specific new legal bases for Community action. The treaty provisions were superseded by the Treaty on European Union (TEU), which provides the legal basis for the common foreign and security policy (CFSP). The Reform Treaty was to shed the form, language, and symbols of a European Constitution in favor of having another amending treaty, similar in nature to the SEA, Treaty of Amsterdam (TA), or Treaty of Nice (TN). (shrink)

The very idea of the draft European Union (EU) Constitutional Treaty was reexamined after the failed French and Dutch referendums and the Treaty of Lisbon (also known as the Reform Treaty) was drafted and entered into force on 1 December 2009 after it’s ratification by all 27 member states. The traditional notion of a Constitution as a national legal document establishing the social contract and a moral minimum for a particular socially unified group still prevails in legal and (...) political thinking. Indeed, the European Union has some constitutional elements, but absence of the so called ‘European demos’ prevents us from recognizing the founding treaties as a real ‘European constitution’ in the proper sense of the word. The author agrees with the decision to exclude the term ‘Constitution’ from the title and contents of the new Reform Treaty. The author also suggests that softer terms, like ‘European constitutional order’ and ‘European Constitutionalism’ might better reflect the scope of contemporary European integration than the term of ‘a Constitution for Europe’. A rethinking of the ‘constitutional core’ of the Lisbon Treaty was inspired following the so-called Lisbon judgments of Czech, Latvian and German constitutional courts. (shrink)

Since the 1990’s the rise of China provokes heated debates in the West. Numerous politicians and scholars, who study contemporary political affairs, pose the question, which will be the new role of China in international affairs? Many Western observers presume that China will act as the Western powers did in the past, promoting policy of domination, enslavement and gaining profits at all costs. The Chinese declarations on peace, co-operation, mutual interests, and harmony are often considered empty words, a certain decorum (...) of “real politics”, as it had been often practised in the West. An inquiry into the Chinese political and intellectual traditions, almost unknown in the West, challenges such widespread opinions and fears. Of course, it is an open question to which degree the traditional Chinese concepts will determine contemporary policy, since China had been westernised in enormous degree.Nevertheless, attitude to war, struggle, and competition constitutes one of the principal characteristics of each culture and appears closely related to its structure of values. Such attitudes determine political concepts and systems, foreign relations, norms of social life, etc. The analysis of Western and Chinese civilisations demonstrates that in this respect they represented divergent orientations. In Erich Fromm’s typology of societies, the Chinese culture could be considered non-destructive but aggressive, whereas Western civilisation could be called aggressive and destructiveOf course, there were great differences both within Chinese and within Western civilisations. Local/regional cultures belonging to each of them had their own characteristics in respect to struggle, and one could also notice great changes in the course of their histories. In general, at the dawn of these two civilisations, both of them were more or less bellicose, although in the cultures of the Chinese Central Plain “avoiding struggle” traits could be detected quite early. Appreciation of peace and harmony eventually prevailed with the predomination of the Confucian ideology, although Taoism and other schools of thought also condemned struggle and war. On the other hand, in the Mediterranean the bellicose cultures and war-mongering states prevailed. The beginning of this “great divergence” could approximately be dated for the middle of the 1st millennium BC, and the civilisations of East Asia and Europe took the opposite courses in theirsocial and political development. Struggle constituted a fundamental principle in the Western vision of the world-order, and its crucial archetype constituted the eternal struggle of Evil against Good, with the eventual triumph of God, who embodies Good and forces of Light. The Chinese tradition promoted instead the vision of the universe as one giant organism based on the principle of harmony, where Yin complements Yang. Hence both civilisations adopted the dualistic concepts, but one was antagonistic, and the second—complementary.In the 19th century, when Asian nations faced the colonial conquests, many of them tried to protect their independence and modernise themselves. For this end they tried to adopt not only Western armaments and military skills, but also Western bellicose ideology and values. Japan was obviously the champion of such a militarist course, but there were similar tendencies in China as well. Such bellicose ideology reached its apex there during the famous Maoist Cultural Revolution, when class struggle and bellicosity was exalted. The triumph of the Western bellicose approach and rejection of the traditional native heritage marked the century 1860’s–1960’s in China. However, after the unimaginable sufferings of the World War I and II, of Nazism and of communism, the West started to revalidate its traditions condemning war and violence. People started to appreciate peace and co-operation within and among nations. The United Nations and the European Union had been founded for such purposes: to promote peace and co-operation. However, the condemnation of wars did not halt military confrontation of the states, and the West still cultivates political ideologies, which propagate the “proper order” based on competition and struggle. Hence the concepts of multi-party democracy and of free market could serve as hallmarks of the West. In China, since the end of the 1970’s step by step the ancient ideological traditions have been appreciated again and the new concepts of peaceful and harmonious development evolved. At the beginning of the 21st century the Chinese leaders elaborated a new ideology of both harmonious domestic and international order aiming at peaceful development based on co-operation. Of course, there are still vivid the remnants of the previous Western-type approach of the brutal competition and of aggressive foreign policy.Notwithstanding divergent tendencies inside each of these civilisations, in general they both approach each other again, but this time in a common search for peace, cooperation and harmonious development. Their interpretations obviously differ, since in China such concepts are traditional, but rather new in the West, and in various respects both sides have different values and ideals. (shrink)

The Eurozone Crisis is not just a monetary and economic challenge. It is as well the first tremendous challenge of the European Community and as well the national institutions and constitutions of the member states not only within the Eurozone. On one side the European Commission, the European Parliament and the ECB with its endeavours to safeguard and stabilize the single currency EURO within the Eurozone, to support the suffering countries in the south with its struggle against (...) speculative hedge funds, to render financial relief measures to those countries and its financial industry. Irrespective the fact governments and citizens within that countries, less appear to appreciate or honor that measures as efficient help to stabilize but condemn as form of European paternalism and patronage. On the other hand the countries and its citizenship especially in the north of the Eurozone to set a stop sign to the EU and the ECB. Therefore they stress the Maastricht criteria and cite the Art 125 of the TEU, which prohibits one nation to stand for or to be liable for the Government debts of another nation. Especially in the German perspective the demarcation line appears to run along between the European Commission, European Central Bank and European Court on the European side and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Bundesbank on the national German side. Each of the institutions feels to be bound to its origin functions and principles and save the respective constitution and the task rendered by that constitution. For a better understanding it is essential to get aware of and to reinforce the constitutional role which the Grundgesetz awarded to the Bundesverfassungsgericht and the Bundesbank and the German citizenship placing their confidence in these institutions. Es soll konkret das Verhältnis zur Nichtbeistandsklausel No-Bail-out Klausel Art 125 AEUVertrag, den Europäischen Fiskalpakt / dem ESFS, ESM / dem OMT-Programm der EZB, möglichen Entwicklung des EU zur Haftungs- und Transferunion mit einem zukünftigen Haftungsautomatismus der Mitglieder, der Unterscheidung von gemeinsamer Währungspolitik und nationaler Wirtschaftspolitik, der drohenden Vergemeinschaftung von Staatsschulden einzelner EU-Länder, die Budgethoheit des nationalen Parlaments als freie Entscheidung über die Verwendung des nationalen Haushaltes untersucht werden. Mit allen diesen Fragen mussten sich das höchste Deutsche und Europäische Gericht in jüngster Vergangenheit intensiv beschäftigen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And Her Substance Would Be Mine":Envy, Hate, and Ontological Evacuation in Josephine Hart's SinA. Samuel Kimball (bio)Envy involuntarily testifies to a lack of being that puts the envious to shame.—René Girard, A Theatre of EnvySin, offspring of snt-ya, "that which is," in Germanic sun(d)jo, "it is true," "the sin is real," and ultimately from es-, "to be," source of am, is, sooth, soothe; of the Sanskrit roots sat- and (...) sant-, "existing, true, virtuous"; of the Latin, esse, "to be," from which is derived such words as essence, presence, absence, and represent; of the Greek roots einei, "to be" as well as ont-, "being," which provides the name for the philosophical study of being itself, ontology.—Adapted from The American Heritage Dictionaryof Indo-European RootsI: Ruth Garton's Envious NarrationThe etymology of sin suggests that the evil it names reveals something fundamental about being, something ruinous and yet unavoidable, something that endangers or even nullifies being and yet is inseparable from it, even essential to it. In Josephine Hart's second novel, Sin, this something is a species of Girardian desire in the form of a monstrous envy, which impels the first-person narrator, Ruth Garton, to a lifelong hatred of her cousin and stepsister, Elizabeth. The focus of Ruth's confessional narrative, envy, drives Ruth to take covert and increasingly virulent revenge against her quasi-sibling in a self-deluding attempt to appropriate not only the objects of Elizabeth's desire but ultimately Elizabeth's desire itself and the apparent ontological fullness that Ruth attributes to it. Over the course of her life, then, Ruth loses the promise [End Page 239] of her name in her ruthless pursuit of her enemy. As she becomes increasingly frustrated in her efforts to destroy her sister's life, Ruth finally turns her hatred of her nemesis against herself as well as the readers to whom she appeals for understanding. If envy heightens Ruth's consciousness to the point where she can perceive that her desire signals her ontological emptiness, nevertheless, it so captures her, so dominates her emotional and cognitive life, that she is unable to find a way to affirm her own—or anyone else's—being in the world. The result is a spectacular narrative record of the cost of recognizing but being unable to resist the mimeticism of desire.1II. The Girardian Dynamic of SinAs Girard has demonstrated, one of the most difficult existential challenges is to understand that desire is mimetically mediated. The result is that we come into our desire only through someone else's and always want something more and other than we think we want. Behind every move to possess a particular object is a largely unrecognized and in principle unsatisfiable desire for absolute satisfaction in the form of ontological completeness, self-sufficiency, intactness. On the one hand, Girard writes, "by the example of his own desire…the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object" (1977, 146). On the other hand, since to desire mimetically means to come into desire through the other rather than through oneself, by this same example the model conveys to the subject the contingency, the dependency, the secondariness, hence the emptiness of the subject's desire, even the subject's lack of desire, the lack that, paradoxically, constitutes his or her desire. Therefore, to be subjected to the other's want ultimately has the effect of signaling the seeming priority, fullness, and self-origination of this other person's desire. For this reason Girard asserts that "man... desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess" (146).If at first the other person models the desire that the subject lacks, it is in the logic of mimesis that the other will become a rival and, unless the rivalry is somehow interrupted or abrogated, inevitably an enemy to be destroyed. The subject will become locked into a potentially deadly game of trying to obtain the same object that the model desires, so as to experience the satisfactions—ultimately, the sense of being—that the object in question seems to provide... (shrink)

Europe's economic constitution is obviously affected in a very fundamental way. There is every reason to depart from an historical reconstruction of the origins of the economic constitution in the early 1920s, to consider its remarkable renaissance in postwar Germany, and to explore against this background its emigration to the European level of governance as well as its development and metamorphosis in the integration process. This chapter focuses on the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which, once hailed as the (...) crowning achievement of Europe's market building and the precursor of a more truly political Union, has become the epicenter of the present crisis. Ordoliberalism and the social‐market economy managed to coexist peacefully and dominated public opinion. The chapter also discusses the practices of Europe's crisis management and the specifics of the governance modes that they are generating. (shrink)

Starting from the presupposition that European democracy is necessary to the survival and development of the European Union, the author deals with the process which may entail a European constitution, and discusses the elements of the present legal structure of the EU which are conducive to a European Democracy. In particular, the author focuses on the incomplete, polycentric, and dynamic character of a possible EC/EU constitution, and on the duality of its legitimating principle. This claim is (...) that these characteristics necessitate some institutional modifications of democratic principles if compared with national democracy, and that Euro‐democracy is possible if we do not simply apply the standards of democracy valid for Member States, but succeed in developing criteria which are adequate to the institutional qualities of the EC/EU. Finally, the author maintains the legal character of the regulatory power of the Community, and invokes the mutual legal bonds linking the Member States and their peoples as the source of the Community. (shrink)

The article discusses three issues that are strictly interwoven with each other. The first is the relation between the eyewitnesses’ memories of past events, the recording of such memories in institutionalized archives, and the historical reconstructions thereof. The issue is treated within a systematic perspective, in order to clarify in which sense eyewitnesses constitute the basic pillars of any historical work.The second is the role played by eyewitness of the Shoah, which is related to the “politics of memory”. The social (...) function of such a politics is important not as a form of monumentalization of the past, but rather as an attempt to improve a shared memory for an event – the Shoah - whose cultural and political meaning concerns the European heritage as a whole and not only the history of the Jewish people.The third is an attempt to read the Shoah as an expression of biopolitics - in the foucauldian sense of the term. That will provide a framework for a discussion about contemporary forms of social and institutionalized violence, under the assumption that the scope of the Holocaust Studies and their methodology reach far beyond the phenomena related to the Shoah. (shrink)