About
Welcome to the Dahrendorf Symposium blog!! We very much hope that you enjoy reading the blog. We hope even more that you are provoked by it!! If you are, please contribute!! It is hard to think of a time when more challenging or divisive issues have confronted Europe and the European Union. And that must mean there are a range of views out there!!
This blog has two aims – a little one and a bigger one. The little one is to prepare the ground for the Dahrendorf Symposium (www.dahrendorf-symposium.eu) we are holding in Berlin in November. The bigger one is to spark debates on Europe. For that we equally welcome views of both those who equate Europe with a stronger, more supranational European Union and those who believe it involves a Europe without the European Union. Please write in and, in the spirit of Lord Dahrendorf, challenge existing assumptions and too readily held beliefs.
The blog is organised by Mariana Chaves. Mariana is finishing her doctorate at the London School of Economic and Political Science on EU criminal law. Please write in to Mariana if you have any suggestions about how to improve the blog or if you think we should contact anybody who would do an excellent post. Mariana’s e-mail is m.chaves@lse.ac.uk
The recent comments on the site about “the politics not keeping up with the economics” reminds us/me of other circumstances 235 years ago when 13 ‘states’ combined to form the USA. They made ‘politics’ the first base, by the creation of a Constitution, and the economics followed. Since that point, no one appears to have quibbled that North Dakota’s economic base is slightly different to Texas, nor that any State should be forced out of the Union because it cannot pay its way.
All of us should know that the States of the USA are as different in their cultural background, notwithstanding the unifying process of the Founding Fathers’ background, and we in “Europe” need to make much more of what unites us, a small matter of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, one might suggest, than what divides us. European ‘civil wars’ in the 1914-18 and 1939-41 might even be seen as some sort of parallel to the US Civil War, and what needed to be done after that, but also how long it takes: just under 100 years to finally out in place the =for example – the equality legislation.
It would be good to hear more strident voices promoting the common themes, and not the national positions – to allow the politics to catch up.