Dr. Rena Schwarting

The creation of the European Union refers back to the process of ensuring peace after centuries of turmoil and barbarous wars. Trade instead of war was the fundamental motivation of its founders. However, the establishment of institutions failed to transform the military fight adequately into political antagonism. According to Chantal Mouffe, every kind of fight needs fronts or contrary parties that put their opinion at stake in order to negotiate visions, and for absorbing people’s emotions politically. Democracy as the evolutionary winning model deals with the distinction of government and opposition. The difference guarantees that not voted parties can be elected in a forthcoming procedure – enabling that possibly disappointed decisions can be made in a different way; it is just a matter of time. And it is a modern tragedy that ideas being ahead of the times often have to wait until outworn opinions and habits die out before social progress unfolds.

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Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety, said Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the Founding Fathers of the United States in 1759. More than 200 years later the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann brought forward the scientific illumination of Franklins famous words: The outside world knows no risks, for it knows neither distinctions, nor expectations, nor evaluations, nor probabilities – unless self-produced by observer systems in the environment of other systems (2008: 6).

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