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Justice in European Political Discourse – Comparative Report of Six Country Cases

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Justice in European Political Discourse – Comparative Report of Six Country Cases Justice in European Political Discourse – comparative report of six country cases Dorota Lepianka This Report was written within the framework of Work Package 4 “Political, advocacy and media discourse of justice and fairness’’ June 18 Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Acknowledgements This report would not have been possible without the contribution of researchers who have prepared country reports (listed in the Bibliography section): Wanda Tiefenbacher (ETC-Graz, Austria), Eva Zemandl (CEU, Hungary), Maria Paula Meneses, Bruno Sena Martins and Laura Brito (CES, Portugal), Ayse Buğra and Mehmet Ertan Want to learn more about what we are working (Bogazici Universitesi, Turkey), Claudia Hartman, Pier-Luc on? Dupont and Bridget Anderson (University of Bristol, the United Kingdom) and Basak Akkan (Bogazici Universitesi, Visit us at: Turkey) – a co-author of the report on the European : https://ethos-europe.eu normative framework of justice. Their contribution, Website patience in answering questions and advice have been Facebook: www.facebook.com/ethosjustice/ invaluable. All mistakes and possible misinterpretations are mine alone. Blog: www.ethosjustice.wordpress.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/ethosjustice Hashtag: #ETHOSjustice Youtube: www.youtube.com/ethosjustice European Landscapes of Justice (web) app: http://myjustice.eu/ This publication has been produced with the financial support of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission. Copyright © 2018, ETHOS consortium – All rights reserved ETHOS project The ETHOS project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 727112 2 About ETHOS ETHOS - Towards a European THeory Of juStice and fairness, is a European Commission Horizon 2020 research project that seeks to provide building blocks for the development of an empirically informed European theory of justice and fairness. The project seeks to do so by: a) refining and deepening the knowledge on the European foundations of justice - both historically based and contemporary envisaged; b) enhancing awareness of mechanisms that impede the realisation of justice ideals as they are lived in contemporary Europe; c) advancing the understanding of the process of drawing and re-drawing of the boundaries of justice (fault lines); and d) providing guidance to politicians, policy makers, advocacies and other stakeholders on how to design and implement policies to reserve inequalities and prevent injustice. ETHOS does not merely understand justice as an abstract moral ideal, that is universal and worth striving for. Rather, it is understood as a re-enacted and re-constructed "lived" experience. The experience is embedded in firm legal, political, moral, social, economic and cultural institutions that are geared to giving members of society what is their due. In the ETHOS project, justice is studied as an interdependent relationship between the ideal of justice, and its real manifestation – as set in the highly complex institutions of modern European societies. The relationship between the normative and practical, the formal and informal, is acknowledged and critically assessed through a multi-disciplinary approach. To enhance the formulation of an empirically-based theory of justice and fairness, ETHOS will explore the normative (ideal) underpinnings of justice and its practical realisation in four heuristically defined domains of justice - social justice, economic justice, political justice, and civil and symbolic justice. These domains are revealed in several spheres: a) philosophical and political tradition, b) legal framework, c) daily (bureaucratic) practice, d) current public debates, and e) the accounts of the vulnerable populations in six European countries (the Netherlands, the UK, Hungary, Austria, Portugal and Turkey). The question of drawing boundaries and redrawing the fault-lines of justice permeates the entire investigation. Alongside Utrecht University in the Netherlands who coordinate the project, five further research institutions cooperate. They are based in Austria (European Training and Research Centre for Human Rights and Democracy), Hungary (Central European University), Portugal (Centre for Social Studies), Turkey (Boğaziçi University), and the UK (University of Bristol). The research project lasts from January 2017 to December 2019 3 Executive Summary The primary goal of this study is to uncover how justice, as an abstract and complex concept and phenomenon, is conceptualized – explicitly and implicitly – in political discourse. Our interest in political discourse is driven predominantly by its presumed effects on the general public. Political debates contribute to, and often even determine, the societal recognition and social legitimation of social problems, such as specific forms of injustice, for example, as objects of state intervention; they also affect the social mobilization for action on social problems. The primary objective of this report is to map the various conceptions of justice, and especially justice as representation, that emerge in the political debates in six countries participating in ETHOS project and to juxtapose them against the normative justice framework promoted on the European level. We focus on the imaging of justice for minority groups that are more likely to be classified as the ‘other’ and thus excluded from the (national) systems of reciprocity. For the purposes of this study we defined political discourse as mode of knowledge manifested in texts by institutional political actors. In each country we analysed documents produced by political actors in two clearly defined discursive contexts: (1) recent election campaign(s) and (2) country specific case/ ‘discursive event’ that triggered debates on issues of justice, representation and/or rights of minority groups. The document analysis was supplemented by interviews with public figures. In the course of the analysis, we identified four meta-discourses that fall along two distinctive axes – one related to the definition of whose moral reasoning and well-being is prioritized (majority vs minority) and the other pertaining to the delineation of how a specific vision of justice and imagined common good is to be realized (through dialogical reconciliation vs struggle). One of the most interesting insights of our study is the interplay between temporality and history in shaping ideas about minority claims to justice. ‘History’ evolves from our analysis not only as an important context of contemporary political debates but also as one of the battlefields of (recognitive) and restorative justice. In general, the discourses identified on the national level seem to fall short of the European ideal as embodied in the documents issued by the European Parliament and Council of Europe. iii Table of Content Acknowledgments ____________________________________________________________________ i Executive Summary __________________________________________________________________ iii Table of Content_____________________________________________________________________ iv Table of Figures _____________________________________________________________________ vi Introduction – why discourse analysis? ___________________________________________________ 1 Study objectives ____________________________________________________________________________ 2 The temporal and geo-social context of the study _________________________________________________ 3 Methodology ________________________________________________________________________ 5 Analytical challenges _________________________________________________________________________ 7 Findings ____________________________________________________________________________ 9 Who is being represented? ____________________________________________________________________ 9 The understandings of representation _________________________________________________________ 13 Mapping the conceptions of justice ____________________________________________________________ 15 Justice as book keeping _____________________________________________________________________ 17 Boundaries of the imagined community of value _______________________________________________________ 20 Justice as majoritarian rule (and ‘ontological security’) ____________________________________________ 23 Boundary drawing _______________________________________________________________________________ 30 Justice as freedom from domination, oppression & neglect ________________________________________ 32 Boundary drawing _______________________________________________________________________________ 42 Justice as care and responsibility (or harmony through care and responsibility) _______________________ 44 Boundary drawing - (un)conditional belonging? ________________________________________________________ 48 National discourses vs. EU normative framework ________________________________________________ 50 How ‘European’ are the national discourses? __________________________________________________________ 53 Discussion and conclusion _____________________________________________________________ 56 Bibliography ________________________________________________________________________ 60 Appendices I – Background information on the discursive events analysed per country____________
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