The European Union (EU) conceives of itself as a legal community, committed to “the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities” (Article 2 TEU). However, in analogy to the EU's multi-level governance structure, the European legal order resembles a decentered, compound arrangement of national and supranational courts that apply law from several legal sources (national law, European law, and the European Convention on Human Rights). Moving beyond descriptive labels such as “European judicial network” or “cosmopolitan legal order”, this undergraduate seminar addresses students that wish to understand how and why law and courts matter for the polity, politics and policy of the EU and the national member states, and what role litigants (and their legal representatives) play in this context. In a first step, we will critically engage with theoretical concepts and frameworks for studying the relationship between law and society and the role of courts. In a second step, we will explore the role of courts in promoting and conditioning integration. Thereafter, we shift the perspective to the role of litigants. In a concluding step, we will touch upon current crises engulfing the European legal order.

Contemporary Europe is increasingly becoming aware of its colonial pasts. From political debates about postcolonial responsibility, to new trends in popular literature in mainstream historiography, and major museums taking stock of the provenance of their collections, the imperial past is visible throughout public life.

This course is designed to help students understand the postcolonial turn in European societies and cultures. It acts both as an introduction to postcolonial theory and dependency studies, and as an exploration of Europe’s internal and external colonialisms. Students will be introduced to classic postcolonial thinkers from the global South, such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, whose critiques of European imperialism and western discourse laid the foundations for further critical reflections on global colonial legacies. We will also explore the imperial legacies of individual western European nations and their dominant representations of imperial history, as well as the implication of the EU as a supranational body in the legacies of imperialism.

Debates around colonial relations along Europe’s east-west axis will also be studied in some depth: is the very notion of ‘eastern Europe’ an ‘intellectual project of demi-Orientalization’, as Larry Wolff has argued? Moreover, was the Soviet Union a colonial empire, and how did the fall of state socialism in 1989/91 affect the region and its dependencies?

Overall, the course will offer a multiperspectival overview of postcolonial approaches to European identities and cultures.

N.B. Students studying for IES Module M7c should sign up for BOTH seminars in the module, i.e. also "08-31-3-M7c-2: Jüdisch-europäische Geschichte und Kultur".