How to Resolve the Crisis of Constitutional Democracy in Central Europe?

In the constitutional democracy, all of the three elements of democracy: input and output legitimacy and the political process through which they are connected, have to take place within the framework of the rule of law. Simultaneously, there can be no rule of law if the laws by which the individuals are ruled do not come into being in a democratic manner. Democracy and the rule of law thus presuppose each other, but at the same time their relationship is not entirely symbiotic. There is a dormant democratic threat that the democratic majority will trump the rights of the outvoted minorities. This is what the rule of law is there for to prevent. This counter-majoritarian problem, as it came to be known, is however only a seeming one. If democracy is not understood as a simple rule by the majority, but rather as a system of the organization of political power whose central value is the protection of equal human dignity, then the constitutional self-limitation of the democratic majority is not democracy’s denial, but its vindication.

Against this theoretical background, the Conference will focus on a very practical challenge. It will proceed from the fact that the constitutional democracy has been in an incremental, but definite decline across the European Union, but in particular and most acutely, in the Central European States. On this basis, the Conference will ask a single question:

How to redeem the status of constitutional democracy properly so-called in the praxis of Central European countries?

Friday and Saturday, 9-10 December 2016
The Graduate School of Government and European Studies and the
European Faculty of Law, Classroom 3, Cankarjevo nabrežje 11, Ljubljana, Slovenia