Random Variable

Due to an incident involving not being able to find my tickets for the Wireless Festival later today, and planned engineering works on the Underground which I completely forgot about, I arrived an hour late.

As a result, I only caught François Foret’s presentation on legitimation issues for the EU, and Max Fras and David Herbert’s presentation on European Enlargement and Secularizaton in Eastern Europe.

Foret’s take home message is that religious institutions may become banalised to private individual practise or play a larger role in the creation of a European polity. However, he doesn’t believe religion is a particularly special case for the EU, in the fact that the European identity still has yet to be established, and the EU’s current method of building functionalist institutions doesn’t lend itself too well to the creation of legitmacy and identity.

Fras and Herbert presented a few examples of Eastern Europe, namely Poland, Romania and Hungary within the context of secularisation and religion. They believe that what is currently taking place is a deprivitisation of religion in Eastern Europe, after experiencing decades of forced-secularisation by the Soviets, it is natural that religion reemerges. Their talk ties in with Sabah Mahmood’s claims that we need to challenge notions that greater affluence, open markets, education, healthcare etc… neccesarily results in secularisation.

Norman Doe presenting a paper on a possible common law for Europe, came in for a lot of flak, which he treated with very good humour. He’s the kind of person you’d like as a supervisor but you know would make a flippant remark when you need some crucial assistance.

Anyway, next session in ten minutes.