Do Europeans really feel European? Do they trust each other and are they solidary? What do they think of immigration and refugee influx? Do they want a greener and more sustainable Europe, and at what cost? Are democracy and human rights ingrained in Europe or are they under pressure? A new edition (2022) of the ‘Atlas of European Values’ answers these and other questions related to pressing topics such as migration, democracy, sustainability, welfare, identity, and solidarity in an attractive, visual way. In the Atlas, the reader will find maps, charts and graphs based on high-quality data of the long-term comparative survey research project, the European Values Study.

This book discusses the meaning of the common good in a European Union thorned by nationalist tendencies and presents concrete policies to improve its achievement. It analyses the normative relevance of EU values as a shared moral standpoint that allows highly diverse member states to label a given collective choice as 'good' or 'bad'. It discusses the role of EU institutions as both guardians and enablers of EU values in a globalised world and introduces a few proposals for institutional reform at the EU level that could strengthen this role. It also presents six strategies to improve civic friendship in the EU, in the absence of which any institutional efforts to promote the common good may be undermined by the citizens' lack of willingness to share its burdens.

Democracy and Media in Europe: A Discursive-Material Approach is a theoretical reflection on the intersection of democracy and media through a constructionist lens. This focus allows us to understand current political struggles over democracy, and over media's democratic roles, with the latter ranging from the traditional support for an informed citizenry and the watchdog role, to the organization of agonistic debate and generating fair and dignified representations of society and its many (sub)groups, to the facilitation of maximalist participation in institutionalized politics and media. Moreover, the book's reconciliation of democratic theory and media theory brings out a detailed theoretical analysis of the core characteristics of the assemblages of democracy and media, their conditions of possibility and the threats to both democracy and media's democratic roles. This short book provides in-depth reflections on the different positions that can be taken when it comes to the performance of democracy as it intersects with the multitude of media in the 21st century.

This edited volume analyses the digital development of the European Union, presenting an interdisciplinary perspective from the disciplines of political science, international relations, economics, and law. The contributions address the main areas where the EU can, and should act, for creating an efficient and protective digital space in Europe. The book highlights the responsibility of the European Union to work on the future of its digital development, looking for prosperity and defending the European conception of society. It explains how European values must be incorporated into the digital revolution and shows how the digital revolution of the EU will defend the Europeans from new threats.

This book delves into the doctrine of separate spheres within the history of economic thought. The concept of separate spheres emerged in philosophy and has consistently been incorporated by various disciplines. This book stands as the first comprehensive exploration of how this doctrine was embraced, adapted, and contested by economists engaged in gender issues and marriage theory. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, it illuminates the evolution of the drive for gender equality--rooted primarily in the tradition of classical liberalism--across the landscape of economic ideas and theories.

This book investigates the relationship between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and national constitutional courts by providing a more general assessment as seen from the former's perspective. Adopting an empirical approach, the book reviews all the case law of the ECtHR in which constitutional courts are cited. This represents more than 3,000 rulings spanning more than fifty years, from the establishment of the Strasbourg Court in 1959 - when only three constitutional courts were active - to 1 January 2023, when there were more than thirty active constitutional courts in the Council of Europe's Member States. This wide-ranging empirical study pursue several different goals. First, the book provides a quantitative assessment of the relevance of constitutional courts in ECtHR case law and presents weighted data on the frequency and chronological evolution of the citations, as well as individual statistics for each national constitutional court. Second, it assesses the extent of the rationalisation of constitutional justice systems conducted by the Strasbourg Court and defines the standards and elements of the right to a fair constitutional trial under Article 6 ECHR. Finally, combining this extensive dataset with qualitative analysis, the book evaluates how the Strasbourg Court interacts with each constitutional jurisdiction and provides a qualitative assessment of this relationship from the standpoint of Strasbourg case law.

European Media Systems for Deliberative Communication explores how four dimensions of national media systems - the legal framework for freedom of expression and information, media accountability, journalism and audience media usage and competencies - contribute to or are detrimental to the success of deliberative communication. Drawing on a study of 14 European countries and their media systems, the volume provides comparative and individual perspectives to examine the social consequences of various types of media systems. By using fsQCA (fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis), the authors relate deliberative communication to the legal framework for freedom of expression and freedom of information, media accountability, journalism and media usage and media competencies. The book shows how different combinations of conditions and contexts figure as risks or opportunities that are detrimental to, or supportive of, deliberative communication, measured with an original index on a European level.

The sometimes complex and controversial relation between the fundamental rights of the European Union, as enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR), and national fundamental rights in the context of constitutional review is reflected in a series of landmark decisions in the multilateral cooperation of European courts, which have reshaped the fundamental rights architecture in the multilevel system in recent decades. This book aims to contribute to a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the EU and constitutional law issues involved, thus serving as a reference point for scholars and practitioners dealing with this emerging topic in depth. Following this approach, it sheds light on the broader Union legal context of these developments, examines the role of the CFR for Constitutional Courts, the relationship between constitutional and ordinary courts, and assesses the key decisions concerning the application of the CFR as a standard of constitutional review. It also draws some initial conclusions on the development of the European fundamental rights architecture, its prospects and possible implications for the Union's legal order. The book contains several contributions by European legal experts from academia and the judiciary, who examine the different methods of constitutional application of the CFR from a comparative law perspective. These contributions deal with the following aspects: first, the role of the CFR for the respective Constitutional Court with regard to the application of EU law as well as national law falling within the scope of the CFR; second, the relationship between the respective Constitutional Court and the ordinary courts with regard to the application of the CFR; third, the relevant facts and legal reasoning of the most important Constitutional Court decisions on the application of the CFR as a relevant standard of constitutional review; fourth, the relevant case law of the CJEU on the relationship between Union and national fundamental rights, as well as its broader implications for the multilateral cooperation of European courts.

Invariablement, tous les cinq ans depuis 1979, à la faveur des élections européennes, le Parlement européen se rappelle au souvenir des citoyens dont il tire une légitimité démocratique sans égal au sein de l’Union européenne.Il est permis d’y voir une injustice et à tout le moins une étrangeté tant, traités après traités, de l’Acte unique européen (1986) jusqu’au traité de Lisbonne (2007) en passant naturellement par le traité de Maastricht (1992), le Parlement européen a bénéficié d’une incomparable promotion institutionnelle. Au point d’exercer depuis quinze ans la fonction de co-législateur de l’Union et d’être entre autres incontournable s’agissant de la désignation de la Commission et de sa présidence ou de l’adhésion de nouveaux États membres. Cette méconnaissance du rôle et de la place du Parlement européen dans le système institutionnel de l’Union nourrit les doutes et les critiques quant au caractère démocratique d’une construction européenne par le droit.

Digitale Intermediäre wie soziale Netzwerke und Suchmaschinen stellen die demokratische Meinungsbildung vor neue Herausforderungen. Auch der Staat ist gefordert, diesen medialen Entwicklungen zu begegnen und den öffentlichen Diskurs zu schützen. Die Arbeit untersucht die verfassungsrechtlichen Grundlagen und Grenzen einer staatlichen Schutzpflicht zur Regulierung digitaler Intermediäre. Als Alternative zum Konzept der "dienenden" Rundfunkfreiheit löst die Arbeit die staatliche Regulierungsverantwortung von spezifischen Mediengattungen. Sie entwickelt stattdessen eine allgemeine Schutzpflicht zum Umgang mit den Risiken des Medienwandels heute und in Zukunft. Beleuchtet werden dabei nicht nur die verfassungsrechtlichen Grundlagen, sondern auch aktuelle Regulierungsansätze wie das Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, den Medienstaatsvertrag und den Digital Services Act.

This book discusses the principle of open justice with a focus on the mechanism of video streaming of court proceedings. The principle of open justice is multidimensional and involves both the human right to a fair trial and freedom of expression. The book distinguishes between three components of open justice: public hearings, media coverage of proceedings, and publication of judgments. All three have been and/or could be substantially affected by the digital revolution: public hearings could benefit from video streaming, the media coverage from social media, and the publication of judgments from online databases.  The book analyses recent advances and challenges related to the digitalization of open justice. Particular attention is paid to the relevant case law of European courts, to the impact of the GDPR with an emphasis on the sensitive issue of pseudonymizing judgments, and to a comparison of various national practices.

What is it that unites the European Union as a polity? Why is it necessary to democratise the EU? Can EU politicisation help democratising the EU? Why do EU citizens in referenda seemingly vote against the EU? And how can a European identity develop? To tackle these questions, this book makes a theoretical, conceptual and empirical contribution to the study of EU politicisation, democratisation, identity formation, and the ways these three are related to one another. The results of a thorough comparative analysis of two prototypical cases, namely French and German national EU discourses and in particular the discourses on the Treaty on a Constitution for Europe (TCE) in 2005, are discussed in relation to more current events such as Brexit and the French elections of 2022. The book thus develops key concepts and theoretical models and delivers profound findings on EU democratisation, identity, politicisation and contestation and their interrelations.

This open access book discusses the state of rule of law protection in Europe, by considering recent challenges to judiciary independence in EU countries. The purpose of the book is to advance solutions to such challenges. It looks at the challenges from the perspective of EU law and ECHR law and puts forward solutions for its improvement and paths of action to be taken by EU political institutions to solve the problems. The book consists of communications presented by leading European scholars, judges and prosecutors, in a conference in Lisbon, organised by Prof. Paulo Pinto de Albuquerque and Judge Filipe Marques.

This book reflects on the nature of the rule of law in the European Union and the present and future consequences of the attacks that are undermining it. Presenting various case studies, it analyses violations of the rule of law and their impact on the quality of European democracy and on the workings of civil and political society. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, the book connects legal aspects related to infringements of the rule of law with their political and sociological consequences at both a general and the EU level. The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the rule of law in the European context and the threats to democracy posed by its violations. It examines how populist movements and parties utilize the erosion of the checks and balances in liberal democracies to weaken resisting intermediate bodies, such as dissenting civil society groups. The second part concentrates on the political perspectives, which it approaches both in terms of its general features and through a set of case studies related to violations of the rule of law. The third part provides a legal perspective on these issues and examines the impact of the rule of law and its infringement in several areas, impacting both the internal and external dimensions of the EU.

The events of the last ten years have shaken the "permissive consensus" that kept the European integration process going for many years. 'Output democracy', as based on decisions presumably meeting the needs of the citizens, is no longer enough to obtain public support. Never before has a process-oriented approach to European democracy been more urgent. This book aims to address this urgency, by providing an account of the European legislative process that is less conventional and does justice to the democratic potential inherent in trilogues. In particular, this book provides: a comprehensive reconstruction of the workings of trilogues, relying on internal documents collected through a series of access to documents requests; gives meaning to the legal notion of informality, understood as one of the most defining, although elusive, features of trilogues; squares the practice of trilogues with the European democratic order of the Treaties, showing that such a practice is compatible with a model of 'negotiation democracy'.

This open access book analyses the international data of the European Values Study (EVS 1990 - 2017), with a focus on the impact of religious on political values from empirical as well as theoretical perspectives, i.e. sociology, political and cultural studies, philosophy, ethics, theology and the law. It interprets results from interdisciplinary perspectives, including the viewpoints of social ethics, sociology and cultural studies, law and practical theology. In the political and public as well as media debates of the European Union, the recourse to (above all "European" and also "Christian") values has played a central and controversial role in the field of politics and religion for several decades. This collection is a contribution to a qualified discourse on values in Europe by providing empirical, hermeneutical and ethical criteria for a responsible use of the concept of values. In addition to a comparison of political value systems in Western and Eastern Europe and the possible role of religion in this context, the book also deals with topics such as, f.i., solidarity, economics and values, value formation, and law and values. Additionally, specific population groups such as the socio-culturally marginalized strata are examined more closely.

The book considers how speech on social media during an armed conflict could potentially be considered a criminal offence. In doing so, it reviews the European Court of Human Rights case law on the limits of freedom of speech in an armed conflict. The author then makes recommendations on how this should be reconciled with freedom of speech in a post-conflict society.  The book first outlines the propaganda cyberwar strategies being employed by the Russian Federation in the war against Ukraine. It then considers such incidents against the criminal law of Ukraine and Germany to determine when speech on social media can be considered an offence.