Armin von Bogdandy speaks at the start of the ConTrust Speaker Series on June 5 about “Trust and conflict in European society”

The general impression in the European Union is that there are many conflicts and little trust. The common analytical grid for this focuses on the relationships between member states: between the democratic ones in the West and the authoritarian ones in the East, between the thrifty ones in the North and the wasteful ones in the South.

However, Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union suggests a different analytical framework: that of a European society. According to this, it is not about conflicts and trust between member states, but about conflicts and trust within a society. The lecture to kick off the ConTrust Speaker Series in the summer semester 2023 on June 5, 2023 at 6:15 p.m. in the “Normative Orders” building on the Westend campus of Goethe University will first present this political decision and analyze its theoretical resilience. In the second step, he shows that the political decision to see ourselves as a European society better reflects the conflict structures and better calibrates the need for trust. The third step illustrates this idea by applying it to the conflict with the Polish government.