Representative justice in the European normative framework and tensions with the national political discourses

Abstract

Political discourses in Europe operate at the supranational, national and local level, with supranational institutions providing a normative framework for the policy making at lower governance level. However, the actual appeal of the legal, political and normative frameworks offered by supranational European institutions remains unclear. For example, while ‘justice’ is deemed constitutive of European values and ideals of democracy, and European institutions offer a clear vision of what ‘justice’ in pluralistic European societies should imply, relatively little is known about how this normative framework is reflected in national-level politics. The current article aims to close this gap by comparing political discourses on representative justice in six European countries with the European normative framework reconstructed on the basis of documents issued by the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Parliament (EP). The research question we address relates to how the European normative framework on representative justice for minority and vulnerable groups is present and strived for in national political discourses. Our analysis shows that the principles of representative justice set out at the supranational European level lose their appeal at the national level politics permeated with conflicting visions of what is just, for whom and on what moral grounds.