Henrik Stenius

The European Political Concepts Research Group, originally sponsored by the Europaeum, will be holding its sixth follow-up meeting in Berlin on Defining Political Concepts in Europe, on December 10-11th, kindly sponsored through the Finnish Institute in Berlin. The Group, conceived in 2006, has been busy exploring how different key concepts in political philosophy can hold very different, contextualised meanings in different countries or regions or sectors or times, of Europe and of European society. At this meeting, participants will include the pioneers, Professor Michael Freeden from Oxford, Professor Henrik Stenius, plus many other colleagues. Please download the Agenda for the meeting, and check out an informational brochure about the Project.

The new Europaeum European Conceptual History Research Project held its first workshop at the University of Oxford on Meanings of Rights and Democracy in Europe, on 17-18th March, 2008.

In the age of European integration and globalisation, the ever increasing cross cultural communication among citizens drawn from different regions, ideologies, social classes, and ethnicities, is becoming a most topical issue. In Europe the challenges of this interaction are highlighted within the European Union, a multilingual polity, with no single grid to show how key juridical and political concepts are used. The language borders and the state borders do not always run together, and their different political language games do not necessarily correspond to national, linguistic or even party political differences. We have to accept that there are no simple or mechanical ways for translating key political concepts; they will always carry within them historical layers with inherent historical controversies.