Eurokrize a postkomunistický "návrat do Evropy": sjednotí se Evropa?

1. května pořádáme na CeLAPA/Ústavu státu a práva AV ČR konferenci, jež jak doufáme propojí dvě aktuální debaty v Evropě a o Evropě: její současnou krizi a zároveň krizi liberální demokracie v mnoha postkomunistických členských státech. Mezi řečníky je řada mých kolegů z LSE, včetně Damiana Chalmerse, budeme moc rádi, když si k nám najdete cestu i na Svátek práce. Níže naleznete více informací, kompletní program je také zde.


THE EURO-CRISIS AND THE POST-COMMUNIST “RETURN TO EUROPE”: WILL EUROPE FINALLY UNITE?

In 1990 Václav Havel ushered the hopes shared by many in Central Europe: that the region ‘could approach a rich Western Europe not as a poor dissident or a helpless, amnestied prisoner, but as someone who also brings something with him: namely spiritual and moral incentives, bold peace initiatives, untapped creative potential, the ethos of freshly gained freedom, and the inspiration for brave and swift solutions’.

 Contrary to what Václav Havel hoped, a belief that there was nothing to learn from post-communist countries prevailed in the West, which took 1989 as ‘a restatement of the value of what [it] already [had], of old truths and tested models’. The people in post-communist Europe swiftly accepted it. The only way to freedom and prosperity seemed to be by way of liberal democracy and market economy. 1989 marked the ‘end of history’.

 Today Europe finds itself in a deep crisis: economic, political, but most of all, spiritual. The pressure of ‘a new global race of nations’, as the British Prime Minister put it in his recent EU Speech, determines how Europeans should live today. China, not America, seems to be the relevant “Other”, against which Europe is going to define itself. As a result, its citizens are ‘sidelined and numbed by the repetitive talk of austerity and economic stability, financial leverage and institutional reforms’. Imaginative political language is rare; instead, economists and economism occupy public discourse. To add to these problems, many post-communist countries seem to be ‘sliding back to authoritarianism’ and the Union is uncertain about how to react. Thinking that these developments reflect ‘a deep-seated nationalism’ or ‘a feeling of resentment and victimization’ is however only partly true. After all, the state of democratic politics in some ‘old’ EU Member States is equally worrying and the EU’s approach to its crisis is far from democratic.

 The conference aims at putting these different ways of understanding the crisis in Europe together; in particular we will discuss possible connections between the crisis of the EU as whole and the problems that the post-communist Europe faces today.




PROGRAMME:

I. “Sliding back to authoritarianism” in Europe: (only) the problem of post-communism?
9:00-12:00
Chair: Damian Chalmers (LSE, Department of Law)

Paul Blokker (Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy): New Democracies in Crisis?

Pal Sonnevend (Eötvös Lórant Universität ELTE in Budapest): Hungary (TBC)

Coffee Break

Radosław Markowski (Comparative Politics Department at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Center for the Study of Democracy at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities: Poland (TBC)

Jan Komárek (LSE, Department of Law and European Institute): The “return to Europe”: 1989 and today

12:00-14:00 lunch

II. Beyond liberal democracy?

14:00-17:00
Chair: Petr Agha (CeLAPA-Institute of State and Law, AS CR and Faculty of Law, Charles University in Prague)

Zsuzsa Gille (Department of Sociology, University of Illinois): Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition? The Case of the Hungarian New Right

Damian Chalmers (LSE, Department of Law): The Diminishing Returns of EU Democratic Agency

Coffee Break

Michael Wilkinson (LSE, Department of Law): Political Union or Functionalist Dystopia? Reflections on the Constitutional Future of the European Union

Mark Dawson (Hertie School of Governance) and Floris de Witte (LSE, Department of Law): The despondent constitution: Rewriting Europe after the crisis .