Previous workshops

Law and Democracy in the 21st Century: European and Indian Experiences

Berlin, June 11-13, 2008

The first workshop was held at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin for two days. It assembled practitioners and scholars from Europe and India from a variety of disciplines (political science, theory, history, economics and sociology).

The workshop intended to start exploring the main theme of the project—the intricate relationship of law and democracy on the background of the internationalization and privatization of law—in a number of discussion focused panels: Unique was the way of approaching this theme from a broader (and partly supranational) comparative perspective, discussing the experiences of the EU as a whole with that of India. It thus discussed developments in two political entities that represent some of the most diverse spaces for democratic accountability in the world. The meeting was exploratory in emphasis and nature. It particularly intended to acquaint the participants from Europe and India with each others’ legal and political systems. The themes ranged: from the role of the Supreme Court in India and the European Union; to the relationship of the courts and democratic legitimacy; the role of new regulatory institutions; trans-judicial borrowing; the domestic legitimation of international law; and judicial activism in Europe and India.

 The workshop identified a number of topics for exploring this problem area further, e.g. by focusing on:

• Functional and institutional comparisons between the European and Indian systems;
• Acquaint each other more about forms of political representation at the national, subnational and supra-national level;
• Investigate the links that run from legislation/the legislative process to policy making;
• Examine trans-judicial borrowing between the two legal systems;
• Trace the increased harmonization and coordination of economic principles;
• Reconstruct the development of mechanisms to hold new regulatory agencies accountable.

The Rule of Law and Democracy

Calcutta, January 14-15, 2010

Next to fundamental rights, the rule of law plays the most important role in international legal cooperation.  Developmental aid is frequently accompanied by the condition that the recipient country fortify the rule of law (“Rechtsstaat”).  The rule of law is what has developed as such in the industrial nations.  In these countries, it rests on a number of tacit presuppositions, many of which are not given in the rest of the world.  It is under the pressure of globalization and the  privatization of various forms of nation-state activity that all kinds of questions are thrown up by, above all, the relationship between the rule of law and democracy.  But these questions are of greatest importance for global expansion of the rule of law, and this is why it was chosen for the second workshop of the "Law and Democracy" group within IEARN.

The following topics were discussed

• Constitutional state – rule by law or rule of law?
• The formal and the substantive understanding of the rule of law
• The relative autonomy of the law
• Rule of law and judicial review

Religion in heterogeneous democracies: Indian and European Cases

Berlin, April 7-8, 2010

The second workshop at the Wissenschaftskolleg, convened by Rajeev Bhargava and Christoph Möllers, gathered altogether around ten European and Indian scholars from a variety of disciplines (economics, sociology, political science, law, philosophy). At stake was a discussion of a number of challenges that the secular character of states has faced in the past three decades, particularly through intensified immigration and other processes associated with accelerated globalization.

The workshop was dedicated to explore the status of political secularism in socially and religiously heterogeneous democracies; and to ask, conversely, about the place of religion in democratic orders. This larger subject of the changing relationship of religion and democracy was in particular approached from three thematic concerns: First, to locate the empirical place of religion in Indian and European democracies, independent of normative conceptions/traditions of secularism. Second, to determine to what extent, and how, the constitutional norms/practices  in the Indian and in the European states differ from mainstream conceptions of secular states (French and American), and thus represent alternative models of the religion-state relationship. Third, to examine, in more normative vein, how different secular norms structure religion-state relationships in India and Europe and thereby realize democratic values in different ways or degrees.

The workshop examined the aforementioned thematic directions in overall four sessions that moved from a theoretical panel, to comparative empirical perspectives, to, finally, lessons for the debate on political secularism that can be drawn from the cases. [“Models of Secularism and Neutrality;” “The Indian Experience;” “The European Experience;” “Political Secularism Revisited.”]

The Law of Language

Nantes, June 14-16, 2012

The Nantes seminar was an occasion for tackling, from a comparative perspective, the multiple facets of the law of language. This must first entail an understanding of the normative nature of language itself, which lays down the law for those who speak it, but it also includes the whole complex of positive law, whose objective is to establish a linguistic system within a state or group of states.  These two questions – one philological and the other of a legal nature – are closely linked and permit insight into a third question, namely that of the political uses to which language is put, for history has shown that the political use of language has a role in defining  the democratic or totalitarian character of power.

The program if the workshop had the following sessions:

• First session: the normativity of languages
  Chair : Ashok Vajpeyi Poet and literary critic
  Speakers : Charles Malamoud (Key Speaker), Arild Utaker, Annie Montaut, Iso Camartin

• Second session: the linguistic regime
  Chair : Philipp Dann Professor of Law in Giessen University
  Speakers: Justice Aftab Alam (Key Speaker), Jean-Claude Barbier, Ashutosh Dayal Mathur, Madhav Khosla

• Third session: the politics of languages
  Chair : Suresh Sharma Historian and Anthropologist, CSDS–Delhi
  Speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Key Speaker), Menaka Guruswamy, François Ost, Kalyani Ramnath, Stefan Kroll

• Fourth session : Round table - reactions and perspectives
  Chair : Sitharamam Kakarala Senior fellow in the CSCS-Bangalore
  With Upendra Baxi, Lyne Bansat-Boudon, Samantha Besson, Beban Sammy Chumbow, Dany-Robert Dufour