Rewriting Rights in Europe by Linda Hancock Carolyn O'Brien

Author:Linda Hancock, Carolyn O'Brien [Linda Hancock, Carolyn O'Brien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138742659
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

It is a brand of pessimism which can slide into racism, peremptorily to rule out families of nations from participation in valuable institutional and cultural possibilities, such as legally guaranteed civil and political rights, on the grounds that they are not used to them. Condescension and marginalisation are softer forms of the same phenomenon. On the other hand, only if culture and communism count for nothing will it be easy to understand what might be done in Poland, say, without understanding Poland. Or simply by understanding America. Yet many of the universalist assumptions and ambitions of post-communist institutional transformers are built on explicit or, more usually, implicit denials of the possibility that there are fundamental social and cultural particularities anywhere. Such denials might be justified, but they are hardly self evident. For if communism produced societies that were truly sui generis, as some writers have alleged, then the fact that this is the first post-communist transition in history is a deep fact. If, however, pre-existing historical particularities and traditions have reasserted themselves on the rubble of communism, then those who would seek to understand the present and future will need to know something about these particulars from the past.

At various times, dissidents under communism described the situation in their countries as hopeless and serious, hopeless but not serious, and some-times—when dizzy with success—wonderful but not hopeless. There are contemporary, post-communist parallels to each of these tragi-comic diagnoses. For what it is worth, my own guess about the matters I have been discussing is: serious but not hopeless, and certainly not hopeless in principle. For while there is no overwhelming reason to believe that constitutionalism and the rule of law will be successfully established in the region, it needs to be stressed that there is equally no overwhelming reason to believe that they will not.

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