Editorial

• Published date: 01 July 2005
• Author: Francis Snyder
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2005.00265.x
• Date: 01 July 2005

Editorial

Francis Snyder

The European Law Journal inaugurates, in this issue, its first Symposium. The editors

of the ELJ intend the Symposium to be a means for presenting several closely related

articles on the same theme in a single issue of the journal, while also preserving space

in the same issue for articles on other topics. We hope that the Symposium will allow

greater flexibility for potential contributors, especially people cooperating in joint

research projects, to make their work available through the ELJ to a wider audience.

We expect the Symposium to complement our regular issues and our special issues, not

to replace them. In making this new format possible, we have taken account of numer-

ous suggestions from readers and contributors. We are very excited by the prospect of

using the Symposium to develop further a transnational public space for debate about

European Union law and integration, the place of the EU in the world, and other

current and emerging themes.

The Symposium in this issue is devoted to ‘Deliberative Constitutional Politics’.

Carlos Closa and John Erik Fossum, its initiators and organisers, explain the origins,

ideas and coherence of the papers in their presentation. We welcome this initiative, not

only because of the topic and the quality of the papers, but also because it brings

together a closely interlinked set of contributions from lawyers and political scientists.

The articles originated from a workshop within the EU 5th Framework Project on ‘Cit-

izenship and Democracy Legitimacy in the EU’ (CIDEL). CIDEL is a joint research

project between ten partners in six European countries, including Germany, Greece,

Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It focuses on the prospects for a citi-

zens’ Europe, asking, in particular, whether a rights-based post-national union, based

on a full-fledged political citizenship, is emerging in the EU. CIDEL is coordinated by

ARENA—Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo, an interdisciplinary

research centre for advanced study of the dynamics of the changing political order of

Europe. For further information about CIDEL, readers should consult its website at

.no/cidel/index.html>. We are delighted to publish these papers

in our first Symposium, and we hope that they will provoke further reflections and stim-

ulate debate. We also hope very much that it will make the important work of CIDEL

and ARENA known to an even wider audience, not only in the EU but throughout

the world.

This issue of the ELJ also contains three other articles, each dealing with a different

but controversial topic. The article by Howard pursues the subject of EU constitu-

tionalism by focusing on anti race discrimination measures in Europe. It compares the

June 2000 EU Council Directive implementing the Principle of Equal Treatment

between Persons irrespective of Racial or Ethnic Origin and the December 2002

General Policy Recommendation No. 7 on National Legislation to Combat Racism and

European Law Journal, Vol.11, No. 4, July 2005, pp. 377–378.

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