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In the last decade, freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) emerged as part of the European Union’s (EU) agenda in two ways: first, through attempts of its institutionalisation as a full-fledged diplo...

Surrogacy has appeared in the European Union (EU)’s agenda since the early 2010s following the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the advisory opinions of the European Co...

Prostitution is a standard case of morality politics (MP), defined as a particular type of politics that engages issues closely related to religious and/or moral values, giving way to strong and uncompromising value conflicts in both societal and political spheres. This kind of issues have increasingly become a European policy matter due to their transnational nature and the tensions they create between different legal principles. Our hypothesis is that this leads to the emergence of a specific type of European morality politics (EMP) reflecting the particular constraints of the policymaking of the European Union (EU). The purpose of this article is to understand to which extent the rise of prostitution on the EU agenda alters usual patterns of MP to shape a distinctive type of EMP. Our findings suggest that prostitution characterizes EMP albeit with a significant difference, namely the challenge to regulatory inertia through the successful mobilisation of European values by some policy entrepreneurs to promote a neo-abolitionist approach.

This chapter discusses the salience, relevance, and effects of religion at the European Parliament (EP) across a range of issues. These are: the allocation of power (religion and European elections); the profile of political elites (members of the EP and religion); the structuring of political forces (religion and party politics, using the example of Christian democracy); and religion and public policy (with cases studies of identity politics and counter-radicalization). The chapter concludes that, when dealing with religion, the EP mirrors what happens in European societies more generally in terms of the secularization and culturalization of faith. The EP also duplicates a frequently found feature of EU policy making: that is, to hollow out the normative and controversial content from religion and to address the topic through the repertoire of human rights, while respecting the national diversity of Member States.

This article explores the implementation of the European Union’s (EU) counter-radicalisation strategy (EUCRS) and its treatment of religion. It focuses on two EU institutional frameworks that entai...

DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13163, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The emergence of an EU counter-radicalisation (CR) strategy has challenged the usual reluctance of European institutions to tackle value-loaded issues. This article examines whether this ne...

L’UE est communement percue comme developpant des politiques qui contribuent explicitement a sa delegitimation. Une hypothese novatrice est que cela releve d’une strategie deliberee de polarisation en poussant a l’extreme les oppositions afin de pouvoir mieux les retourner en sa faveur, selon la theorie de l’« upside-down legitimacy ». Des donnees empiriques inedites eclairent le caractere fictionnel ou realiste de ce scenario, et sont ensuite discutees a la lumiere de l’etat de l’art sur la nature et la justification de l’ordre politique europeen. Cet article adopte un ton parodique dans le cadre du 50eme numero anniversaire de Politique europeenne.

The purpose of this article is to make sense of the resurgence of religion on the political agenda of a secularizing Europe. The focus is placed on the European Union (EU). The religious factor is considered alternatively as an influence on political attitudes and behaviours; as an ideological and party component; and as a controversial policy stake. We analyse the effects of the religious factor in past European elections as an element framing the perception of European integration and voting. We then document the crisis affecting the Christian-Democratic family incarnated by the European People’s Party (EPP) and competing narratives about religion to claim leadership in the redefinition of the core ideology and the boundaries of this political family. Two cases studies are developed: The ‘Hungarian crisis’ and identity politics promoted by Viktor Orban: the Spitzenkandidaten process to select the EPP candidate running for the presidency of the Commission. We finally study the treatment of religion as a policy issue within the EP and as a potential bone of contention in the incoming term.

Since their creation and with an increasing intensity since the 1980s, European institutions have used prizes, labels and other distinctions as political resources to perform and legitimize their action. The purpose of this article is to make sense of this governance by prizes. It documents the occurrences, uses and meanings of European prizes and what it reveals of EU politics and policies. It shows how the EU mobilizes and updates the three usual functions of prizes as claim of centrality and authority by the prize-giver, creation of incentives and compliance for recipients and construction/solutions of/to social problems. The conclusion is that the European governance by prizes mirrors what happens at other levels of governance while adapting it to its politico-institutional singularity. The EU operates with its own logic of symbolic production but remains secondary to member states in the definition of hierarchies of honours and values., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Human dignity has been institutionalized in EU (European Union) treaties. Politically consensual but culturally sensitive, it is increasingly challenged by the growing politicization of morality issues such as abortion and human embryonic stem cell research. The chapter investigates both the substantial controversies and the political effects of human dignity in EU bioethics politics. A qualitative analysis of discourses of 21 civil society organizations and members of the European Parliament sheds light on the consensus-building/conflict-breaking potential of human dignity. The results show that its schizophrenic nature – as a technical and ethical frame, as a consensual and divisive value – mirrors the Janus-faced nature of the EU’s motto: “United in diversity.”

This article analyses the place of religion in European immigration policy. Focusing on the role of faith-based organizations, the purpose is to know how religious issues, actors and references are dealt with in the policy-making process. The method relies on document analysis and qualitative interviews. Our conclusion is mixed: overall, the logics of interactions between religion and immigration are the same at the European and national levels. Religion is neither a proper policy issue nor a legitimizing resource. It is an ethical inspiration and gives credentials to actors from majority denominations, but religious contents have to be translated into secular terms. However, whereas at the national level tensions surrounding Islam have strengthened the political role of minority religions, this is not the case in the European Union. Rather, the policy field is dominated by Christian organizations, who utilize their expertise and influence to act as immigrants’ advocates rather than immigrant repr...

Le numero analyse l’ampleur, les modalites et les effets de l’emergence des valeurs dans le jeu politique, les politiques publiques et le systeme politique de l’UE. L’introduction presente la montee en puissance des valeurs sur l’agenda europeens ; les differentes formes qu’elles peuvent prendre ; leurs effets comme facteurs de conflit, cooperation ou legitimation ; les dispositifs et processus mis en place pour les reguler. Des articles thematiques discutent les interactions entre valeurs et affaires publiques europeennes sous differents angles : potentiel de polarisation dans les opinions publiques ; formatage des politiques culturelles et ethiques, avec les exemples de l’avortement et de la recherche sur les cellules souches ; gestion interne des valeurs dans le fonctionnement de la Commission europeenne.

The aim of RelEP is to analyse the beliefs of the members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and what they do as a consequence of these beliefs; the impact of religion on political socialisation wit...

The project ‘Religion at the European Parliament’ (RelEP) is an attempt to provide data on the religious profile of the European Parliament (EP). Looking at what members of the European Parliament ...

What French members of the European Parliament (MEPs) believe and what they do as a result of these beliefs can be understood in comparison with what we know about MEPs from other member-states on the one hand, and about French national members of Parliament (MPs) and citizens on the other hand. French MEPs do not diverge much from MEPs of other nationalities in the way they deal with religion at the policy level. Significant French specificities remain regarding religion as a cultural and memory reference. The heritage of ‘laicite’ leads to an emphasis on the separation between religion and politics and may be reactivated as a symbolic material to reassert French national identity in confrontation with other political traditions. Religious issues do not make for consensus and are still used as markers of ideological and party boundaries, between right and left and within each side, as they are a relatively costless resource to build a distinctive political profile. Beyond these distinctions, a ‘French wa...

Religion is not a competency of the European Union (EU), but has been more and more an issue on its agenda. The question is to know whether this plays in favour of the legitimisation of a supra- or transnational polity, or represents a further obstacle to it. The central hypothesis discussed here is that religion in itself is less a specific problem than a revelator of the EU difficulty in dealing with any normative reference. Several examples may be taken to illustrate this position, as a synthesis of different empirical researches. The ‘Christian heritage’ debate in the constitutional process has offered no key to solve the longstanding quest for a European memory. Through the institutionalisation of religions as privileged partners of European governance, the EU has tried to socialise religious actors and to make them comply with the rules of participative democracy (pluralism, mutual recognition …). Beyond the interactions of the policy game in Brussels, these rules do not always appear as ge...

Les debats recents ont focalise l'attention sur les enjeux institutionnels du religieux dans le contexte de l'integration europeenne , comme la participation des Eglises a la gouvernance de l'UE, la reference a l'heritage chretien de l'Europe dans le preambule du traite constitutionnel (Schlesinger & Foret, 2006) ou les pretentions renouvelees de forces confessionnelles a peser sur les choix politiques dans certaines arenes nationales (Diaz-Salazar, 2006 ; Garelli, 2006). Le croire se developpe pourtant aujourd'hui en Europe essentiellement sous des formes individualisees et deregulees qui echappent largement au controle et a la mediation des structures politiques et spirituelles organisees. C'est cette dimension informelle, en marge des bureaucraties, des rituels et des dogmes, qui sera ici au cœur de l'analyse. L'objectif des contributions reunies dans ce volume est d'etudier ces phenomenes religieux non institutionnels dans leur interaction avec les processus d'europeanisation qui traversent les societes des Etats membres.