Handbook Political Theory.pdf

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rights the Charter should cover. Those social democrats and conservatives
who took an intrinsic view of community but adopted a resistant view of
globalization wanted the Charter to apply only to EU institutions and to
cover a fairly restricted range of rights—principally the political and eco-
nomic rights deriving from the EU’s current activities. They feared the
Charter could threaten the distinctive national ways of life of the various
member states. In Walzerian fashion (Walzer 1994 ), they contended that
rights might have a ‘‘thin’’ universal form, but their ‘‘thick’’ content reXected
national rather than European or global norms—protecting, for example,
particular languages and religions, a certain approach to free speech, or a
speciWc view of labor practices and welfare. Even within the common frame-
work of the European Convention on Human Rights, which all member
states have signed, there is considerable diversity across Europe on these
issues. Some constitutions, such as the Irish, enshrine a given religion and
particular duties that are said to follow from it; others, such as the Belgian,
give great weight to protecting particular languages; still others, such as the
Italian, highlight the rights of workers and so on. By contrast, conservatives in
the intrinsic community camp who adopted a transformative view wanted to
ground these EU rights in a supposed European culture and especially
Christianity—a move that oVended anti-clericals and secularists in the Con-
vention, while appearing to exclude Europe’s one million Muslims and the
prospective membership of Turkey, along with Jews and other non-Christian
religions. Meanwhile, social democrats of a more instrumental turn, yet who
also took a transformative stance on globalization, saw the Charter as a means
of shifting the EU from economics and the bargaining between nations to a
post-nationalist concern with rights, with these documents acting as the
focus for a distinctive European constitutional identity (Habermas 2001 ;
Eriksen, Fossum, and Mene ́ndez 2002 ; Fossum 2003 ). However, they were
opposed by libertarians, who wished any Charter to entrench the free market
values that the EU has hitherto seen as its prime focus (Vibert 2001 ).
In the end, a combination of vagueness and log-rolling allowed the Charter
to accommodate elements of all these positions (Bellamy and Scho ̈nlau
2004 b). Certain theorists see the Charter’s capacity to encompass such diverse
views as indicative of its success (Fossum 2003 ). Arguably, though, these
disagreements undermine the very project of a rights charter (Bellamy
2001 ). However open the Charter may be in theory, in practice it will have
to be given a speciWc interpretation on particular issues. Some commentators
fear that, as a consequence, the Charter will lead the European Court of


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