Recapturing Concepts: Beyond Rule of Law Minimalism in the European Union
Max Steuer is Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, Jindal Global Law School (India), also affiliated to the Department of Political Science of the Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia). His research centers on puzzles of democracy and constitutionalism in the European Union with a jurisdictional focus on Slovakia and Hungary, and thematic specialization on constitutional adjudication, militant democracy and extreme speech. His works appeared in European Constitutional Law Review, European Journal of Risk Regulation, International Journal of Human Rights, Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis, Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law and elsewhere. Among his recent editorial responsibilities is a coedited special section of the Jindal Global Law Review on ‘Cultural Expertise and Litigation in South Asia and Europe’ (2023). Max is principal investigator for the project ‘Illiberalism and the Constitution of the Slovak Republic: Political Discourse Analysis’ (Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic, 2023–25), coordinator of the educational and awareness-raising initiative Talking Courts (U.S. Embassy in Slovakia, 2023–24) and member of the Management Committee and Working Group on Theory of the COST Action ’K-Peritia (Cultural Expertise Junior Network)’.
Recapturing Concepts: Beyond Rule of Law Minimalism in the European Union
To what extent has the rule of law as a concept been captured by the language of nondemocratic partisan actors in the European Union, and how can individuals and communities committed to constitutional values help recapture it? This project remedies the gap in scholarly analyses of rule of law discourses. It introduced ‘conceptual minimalism’ as a discursive strategy pursuing the logic of ‘anything goes’, whereby the conceptual label and its content become disconnected from each other. Focusing on jurisdictions with a legacy of hierarchical approach to knowledge production as particularly vulnerable to concept capture, and considering evidence on frontrunner dedemocratizers within the EU, the project studies the discourses on the rule of law with emphasis on Hungary and Slovakia in the past decade. The project aims to develop, in interaction with academics and rule of law practitioners, a tangible framework for classifying rule of law representations in public discourses. Subsequently, it aims to apply this framework to analyse both internationally accessible and local discourses on the rule of law by scholars in the EU context in Hungary and Slovakia. By identifying the extent of conceptual minimalism, it expects to also pinpoint the sources and actors that remain resilient towards it.
