The European Union is defined as a legal community. In fact, law and courts have fundamentally shaped and continue to shape European integration. 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. In the first section of the course, we will critically examine the purported function of courts, such as resolving disputes or enforcing legal norms. We will then turn to the role of the supranational European Court of Justice and its interaction with ordinary courts in the Member States, reflecting on the importance of their interaction for constructing a legal order in the EU. Subsequently, we will deal with the role of constitutional courts and reflect on the delicate balance between EU law and constitutional law. In a next step, we will discuss the emergence of a so-called European constitutional network composed of national constitutional courts, the CJEU and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). In a final section of this course, we will apply the acquired knowledge to constitutional politics and the current crisis of the rule of law in selected EU Member States.

Is Europe a happy family of nations? Or have there always been unequal power relations, legacies of conquest, and postcolonial resentments, both within Europe and in relation to the wider world?

This course explores the latter possibility, acting both as an introductory 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 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.

By the end of the of the course, students should be able to:

- discuss critically the foundational ideas of postcolonial theory;
- apply postcolonial methods of analysis to works of literature, film and art, historical sources, political acts and speeches, etc.;
- critically examine Europe’s past in relation to the history and legacies of imperialism;
- analyse east-west divisions in Europe in terms of historical and present-day tensions.

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".