The Cemetery of the March Revolution in Berlin. A key site in the history of European democracy

El presente artículo aborda el Cementerio de la Revolución de Marzo desde su fundación en la Revolución Europea de 1848-49 hasta la actualidad. Durante la revolución de 1918-19, el cementerio fue ampliado y, a lo largo del tiempo, se ha ido transformando repetidamente según los diferentes sistemas políticos. Desde el principio, el Cementerio de la Revolución de Marzo ha sido un lugar que ha cumplido dos propósitos: ser espacio del luto personal de los familiares de los fallecidos y escenario de manifestaciones masivas y actos políticos conmemorativos para promover los derechos civiles y humanos. Los lugares de recuerdo de la historia de la democracia europea, como el Cementerio de la Revolución de Marzo, contribuyen a reforzar nuestras raíces culturales y políticas comunes y a establecer una cultura europea del recuerdo. This essay presents the cemetery of the March Fallen from its foundation in the European Revolution of 1848-49 to the present. During the revolution of 1918-19 the cemetery was expanded and over time it was repeatedly transformed in the different political systems. Right from the start, the Cemetery of the March Revolution has always been a place for two purposes: the personal grief of relatives of the dead, and mass demonstrations and political commemorative events to promote civil and human rights. Sites of remembrance for the history of European democracy such as the cemetery of the March Revolution help strengthen our shared cultural and political roots and help to establish a European culture of remembrance.

Mimicry, Fragmentation, or Decoupling? Three Scenarios for the Control Function of EU Correspondents

In this article, we explore three possible scenarios for the role of EU correspondents in a post-pandemic media landscape that is marked not only by the mainstreaming of misinformation but also by an EU regulatory turn that aims to support media in the post-pandemic era and to stamp out the culture of ‘fake news’. EU correspondents are best placed to function as translators of EU technocratic and differentiated governance. Such a function is a prerequisite to critically assess the content and quality of decision-making, when demands of national EU readerships for EU news are limited and resources for quality journalism restricted. We submit that whether this function of EU correspondents will materialise in the (post-)pandemic era hinges not on their capacity to contribute to the elusive ‘European public sphere’ but on how the EU's action plan for the recovery and transformation of media organisations will interact with the multiple challenges journalists are already facing in the digital era. We propose three scenarios on how such an institutional settlement of EU journalism may play out: mimicry, fragmentation, and decoupling. The aim is twofold: Firstly, to set out a research agenda for empirical investigation of the EU correspondents’ role in European democracy under constant transformation. And secondly, to argue normatively the case for safeguarding the independence and viability of specialist and/or transnational professional journalism bodies, even if these appear increasingly irrelevant from a commercial perspective.

“What Was That Word? It’s Part of Ensuring Its Future Existence” Exploring Engagement Collectives at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

This paper provides an empirical analysis of an initiative to establish a Community of Practice on citizen engagement at the European Commission’s (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC). This initiative is one of the more recent attempts to institutionally stabilize citizen engagement in policy-making processes within the EC; such attempts are visible, for instance, in the political agenda of Ursula von der Leyen, whose sixth priority is a “new push for European democracy.” Drawing on science and technology studies literature, this paper directs attention to models of participation and democracy visible in particular engagement activities and to the overarching rationales for engagement. We explore the sociomaterial engagement collectives that emerge in the practices and accounts of actors involved in establishing this CoP and show how these engagement collectives at the supra-national research service JRC are co-constitutive with the wider institutional settings and cultural–political configurations of the EC.

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

At the start of the pandemic, it looked like the biggest COVID-related threat to democracy, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, was executive aggrandizement. This focus, however, may lead us to overlook a bigger threat to Eastern European democracy. We argue that Eastern European democracies’ original sin of state capture has been exacerbated by the rise of conspiracy theories, whose stock has only increased with the addition of COVID misinformation. Eastern European voters struggle to differentiate between the true political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as COVID denialism, world government, or political correctness as a tyrannical plot. As a result, conspiracy theories enable the state capture camp to divide the reformist opposition and maintain their grip, while simultaneously claiming that they are governing competently and in line with European values. We use an original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications from the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. We call for more research on the conspiracy cleavage as a factor in explaining backsliding processes.

Crisis of the Rule of Law in Europe: The Cases of Hungary, Poland and Spain

Democracy is an instrument at the service of a noble purpose: to ensure the freedom and equality of all citizens by guaranteeing the civil, political and social rights contained in constitutional texts. Among the great principles on which this instrument rests is the division of powers, which consists, substantially, in the fact that power is not concentrated, but that the various functions of the State are exercised by different bodies, which, moreover, control each other. Well, the increasingly aggressive interference of the Executive and, to a lesser extent, the Legislative in material spheres that should be reserved exclusively for the Judiciary, violates this principle and, for this reason, distorts the idea of democracy, an alarming trend that, for some time now, are observed in European Union countries such as Hungary, Poland and Spain. Preventing the alarming degradation of European democracy, of which these three countries are an example, requires not only more than necessary institutional reforms to ensure respect for these principles and prevent the arbitrariness of the public authorities, but also a media network and an education system that explains and promotes these values and principles, that is, one that makes citizens aware of and defend constitutionalism. Keywords: Rule of law; Democracy; Separation of powers; judicial independence; Europe.

Evaluation of EU Activities to Strengthen Democracy in Member States of the Last Waves of Enlargement

The article’s purpose is to assess the effectiveness of EU policies concerning strengthen the quality of democracy in the member states. The research methods are aimed at proving the hypothesis about a decrease in impact (initiatives, control, etc.) of EU institutions on deepening democratic modernization, as a result of a discrepancy on debatable issues between the “young” democracies of the EU (like the Baltic States) and the liberal democratic course of the EU. The research is based on the methodology of neo-institutionalism, value approach and political comparative studies. The results of the study have led to the conclusion that the current goals of the EU are not sufficiently focused on the issue of the quality of democracy in the member states. The need to revitalize the EU in the direction of monitoring the observance of democratic standards is explained by the stagnation/regression of the quality of democracy in these states of the latest EU expansion. The actions of EU institutions in relation to member states, where stagnation/regression of democracy has been manifested, were assessed as inappropriate regarding the possible consequences of this destructive process. Insufficient attention by the EU to strengthening its values on which the EU is based was noted, that is seen as the main reason for the current deterioration in the quality of democracy. The urgency of this new format for European democracy, of really effective mechanisms for ensuring its quality was stated. The authors mentioned a number of open questions that require further study, in particular: 1) are EU initiatives able to reduce the democratic deficit in its member states?; 2) how strong should the EU's control be over the observance of these standards and values of democracy so that it does not contradict the principles of democracy? Attention is drawn to the need of further clarifying these mechanisms which the EU should implement in relation to its member states in order to strengthen the quality of national democratic political systems.