Nuria Hernández García organizes, in collaboration with the Ángel Ayala Humanities Institute and the Department of Political Science, Ethics and Sociology of CEU Cardenal Herrera University, the first interdisciplinary seminar to address the crisis of values in the European Union from the Christian humanist perspective of the Institute and from the legal, political and social perspective of the Department.
“Crisis of values in the European Union: End of the Christian heritage in Europe?” was the name of the seminar that took place on May 22 and that our colleague Nuria Hernández, Collaborating Professor and PhD in Political Science at CEU Cardenal Herrera University, who is also part of the research project on the crisis of the rule of law in the EU directed by Prof. Susana Sanz Caballero, organized with the collaboration of the aforementioned co-organizing entities.
The seminar began with the inaugural lecture by Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, Academic Director and Professor at the Higher Institute of Sociology, Economics and Politics (ISSEP), who spoke about the concept of values in the modern society, and highlighted the fact that we live in the post-truth era, in an emotional world in which there is a need to refocus the economy on what is necessary and objective.
This first conceptualization that allowed to focus the origins of the current crisis of values in the EU gave way to the first round table, in which Jaime Vilarroig Martín and Rafael Fayos Febrer, both professors of the Department of Humanities of the UCH CEU, addressed the issue from a sociological and humanist-Christian perspective.
Prof. Vilarroig analyzed the need of salvation in the contemporary society through the work of four renowed sociologists and philosophers: Lipovetsky’s individualism, Bauman’s society in need of solidity and definition, Beck’s society at risk and Han’s tired society.
For his part, Prof. Fayos focused on the figure of Romano Guardini, a German Catholic priest and thinker, as well as on his four main works in which he speaks of Europe from a Christian worldview, and in which he states that: “Europe can only be Europe on the basis of Christianity“; “Europe will be Christian or it will no longer be anything“, thus emphasizing the great Christian tradition that has always been present in Europe.
The final touch to this first round table was provided by Mateo Baeza Delgado, Collaborating Professor of the Department of Political Science of the UCH CEU, who approached the issue taking as a reference the intrusion of artificial intelligence in the modern citizenship and its impact on the identity values of the Union.
After the coffee break, the second round table started. It addressed the issue of the crisis of values in the EU from a legal perspective. Almudena Del Castillo, PhD student in International Public Law at the UCH CEU and fellow of the research project led by Dr. Sanz was the first one to present the preliminary results of the research line of her doctoral thesis, which focuses on the analysis of judicial independence as a challenge to the rule of law in the EU, based on the case law of the CJEU and the ECtHR, by which both courts have highlighted a number of legal principles common to all Member States of the European Union in relation to the rule of law: the prohibition of arbitrariness of the executive branch and the need for an independent and effective judicial control, among others.
Next, it was our colleague Leopoldo García Ruiz who presented his work on the limitations to freedom of expression and media pluralism in Europe, also taking into account the incidence of the COVID-19 pandemic. He distinguished between what he defined as “open illiberalisms“, the paradigmatic example of which can be found in Poland and Hungary, and the “tacit illiberalisms” that are present in some European countries in which, although in a more silent and less notorious way, the commitment to security makes its way to the detriment of freedom.
In reference to freedom of expression and the media, Prof. García alluded to the ideological and regime transversality as well as to utilitarian societies which, especially in the context of the pandemic, have manipulated the right to freedom of expression, while in democratic societies the problem has not been the “limitation” in a strict sense, but instead, disinformation: the concealment and malicious manipulation of information to achieve a specific end.
To close this cycle of dialogues Enrique Lluch Frechina, UCH CEU professor of Economics and Business, talked about the crisis of the identity values of the Union from an economic perspective, specifically, about the need to change the economic paradigm and to educate in economic values of solidarity.
Finally, Dr. Antonio Bar, co-principal investigator with Dr. Sanz in the MICINN-funded project, had the important task of conducting the closing conference of the event, through a speech in which he managed to summarize the most relevant aspects that had been discussed throughout the conference.
To the question of whether there is a Christian heritage in Europe, Dr. Bar answered that it was clear that there is, insofar as a large part of the values of the EU are a declaration of the Christian heritage. He defined the religious factor as a determining factor in the strengthening or weakening of political norms and pointed out that the very definition of the values of the EU contained in Article 2 of its Constitutive Treaty (“TEU”) includes a concept of undoubtedly Christian roots on which all other human rights are based: the dignity of the human person.
He also analyzed the possible solutions that the European Union could adopt in the context of the constant systematic violations of the Union’s democratic values and, ultimately, of the rule of law. These include solutions of varying nature and intensity: from the need to define more precisely the substantive content of the values in the TEU, to the existence of a rule that would allow the expulsion of States that persistently and seriously violate the values of the Union.
And the fact is that we must remember, in Dr. Bar’s own words that “the EU is not only an economic union but, and primarily, a union of values common to all Member States”.
