Justine Lacroix has been invited by the Collège de France assembly, at the suggestion of Profs Samantha Besson, Edith Heard, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Thomas Römer.
This series of four lectures by Justine Lacroix is part of the Collège de France's Europe cycle. In 2023-2024, this cycle is devoted to the theme " Democratic Europe ".
Recourse to the repertoire of values has become omnipresent both in national public spaces and in the communication and mobilization strategies of European institutions. This recurrent invocation of our shared values overshadows the conflicting nature of the interpretations to be given to the principles that structure a democratic public space. The aim of this first series of lectures is to examine a number of principles proclaimed in the preamble to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, with a view to demonstrating the tensions they entail. A case in point is the assertion that " theEuropean Union is founded on the principles of democracy and the rule of law ".
This association no longer seems as self-evident as it did in the early 2000s, when the Charter was proclaimed. Hence the need to recall the complicated, yet inextricable links woven between the principles of individual freedom and those of collective self-determination (1) and to maintain a sense of the distinctions between liberalism, neo-liberalism and authoritarianism (2). The preamble to the Charter also mentions the desire to establish a " area of freedom, security and justice ".
These three notions are not easy to reconcile, at a time when the imperative of security is leading to the retreat of a certain number of freedoms (3), and when the place given to freedom of enterprise in the European entity may seem to be distancing us from the promises of equality and the demands of social justice (4). The conviction that drives these conferences is that human rights remain relevant to democratic action because of their indeterminacy and self-critical potential in relation to the uses to which they are put and the consequences they may have. Far from being a monolithic community united around supposedly consensual values, democratic Europe should be understood more as the site of a civilized confrontation between different interpretations of the rights proclaimed in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
