Janie Pélabay

One Union, One Story?: In Praise of Europe's Narrative Diversity

Birthdays! The EU’s fiftieth was a particularly paradoxical one. It was celebrated with a general lack of enthusiasm in an end-of-crisis atmosphere, albeit a crisis about which the citizens of Europe did not seem particularly concerned. And yet, the occasion inspired a new flurry of speeches on the ‘European story’ and rekindled appetites for some sort of search for meaning. How to define the ‘soul’, pundits asked, of this Europe characterised by the legal and diplomatic coldness of a rule-of-law state? What are the ideas, values or traditions that bind us together as Europeans? Once more, the questions were posed as to whether it was time for this ‘community of interests’ to become a ‘community of identity’ and whether such a shift was necessary to legitimise the normative and institutional bases of today’s European political order.

France and the Netherlands: Toward Convergence?

In a twenty-first century characterized by distrust, questioning resistance to implementation of non-discrimination law involves analyzing contemporary expressions of one of the main conceptual principles of liberal democracy: political and legal equality.