The Project’s leaders are Professor Ciprian Mihali, Department of Philosophy, University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and Distinguished Professor Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Rhetoric Studies, University of Cape Town.

Description of the project

A comparative study of Romanian and South African public debate regarding the public perception of social and human justice in terms of its rhetorical means and traditions. What is meant by justice is not the legal system, but how popular notions of fairness, redress, equity, even-handedness are rhetorically constructed by public agencies, how they are relayed by the media, and how they are object of formal politics. Recurrent uncertainties in the public sphere regarding the perceptions of the norms of justice, both in Romania and in South Africa, indicate that without a taking into account the rhetorical process in which various norm producing sources contribute to the shaping (more or less coherent) of a system of justice, and the social, individual and collective deliberation, or rhetoric, pertaining to them, public dissatisfaction is likely to perdure and impact on the democratic public sphere. The South African and Romanian societies experience from the level of the individual’s daily life to the level of state institutions the tension produced by such normative conflicts. Public deliberation is the privileged ground for the confrontation of traditional ethics (ethnic, religious, rural) with the will for modernization, the latter being at its turn split into rival or conflictual models (such as, as examples, the European post communist model in the Romanian case ; the reconciliatory model in SA).

General aim

The project intents to provide a comparative study of Romanian and South African public debate regarding the public perception of social and human justice in terms of its rhetorical means and traditions. What is meant by justice is not the legal system, but how popular notions of fairness, redress, equity, even-handedness are rhetorically constructed by public agencies, how they are relayed by the media, and how they are object of for a critical re-evaluation of the principles and concrete manners of construction of the rue of law. The project takes into account how rhetorical modes are work in the public deliberative sphere, which impose rethinking of the manner in which societies that had the experience of the totalitarian state and of the apartheid deliberate on the rule of law.

Scientific objectives

• To better understand the relationship between public rhetoric and the development of democratic civil society with regard to public perceptions of “what is just”, in new democratic cultures such as Romania and South Africa. • To help improve the quality of a culture of public debate in both countries (at state, civic, media, and educational levels). • To offer a top level scientific contribution on the topic of the plurality of the normative sources and the rhetorics of juridical cultures. • To research and critically assess the principles of the Etat de droit and their actual application in modern societies ; • To evaluate by critical analysis the political and juridical documents from the European and the international law, of the system and hierarchy of human rights ;

Formative objectives

• Extensive and detailed documentation on the main topics of the research in both countries (Etat de droit, normative source, post communist society), to be offered for future research • The development of young researchers from the both teams in this field of expertise, and • Establishing practical rules of scientific team work ;

Dissemination of the research results • Establishing a database with the bibliography relevant to the topics • Publication of the outcomes of the joint research • Participation in international scientific manifestations, in which the work hypotheses and results of the research can be critically assessed by the scientific community

Necessity of the project – Analysis of the objectives and the foreseen advantages

The project starts from the premise that the political, social and juridical evolution of the post communist society, especially of the Romanian society, was not accompanied by an in-depth and systematical reflection done by specialists in philosophy and law. The recurrent crises of the political and juridical Romanian system prove that the construction of the Etat de droit in a society that has just come out from a totalitarian epoch is done through punctual initiatives and amendments, without having a long term vision on the functioning of the political and juridical institutions and without taking into account the plurality of normative sources that nourishes not only the elaboration of laws, but also the social, individual and collective behavior related to the law. The absence of a reflection on this evolution is obvious especially in the law field and in the spaces where the juridical research is conducted, i.e. faculties, research institutes or centers. It is a well known fact, and this applies not only to Romania, that under the pressure of the social and economic evolution, universities produce jurists whose main specialization is the civil law or the private law (commercial law, family law, succession law etc.) and less and less specialists in public law or researchers in the theory of law or the philosophy of law. Against such a reflection deficit we do not deplore the absence of a discourse on law (which on the contrary, suffers from an inflationist phenomenon, especially due to the media), but the absence in the law field of a reflection on its own manner to constitute itself as a system of rules. In other words, the project does not question the law in itself, but its social, cultural, religious, historic and economic conditioning.

Thus, the present initiative aims to respond to this lack of reflection, designing coherent objectives at a scientific, formative and information levels. The partnership with the SA side will bring along a transfer of research practices, as well as know-how in identifying and analyzing of the key aspects in the field. It is the common conviction of the two research teams that the motivations and research interests are strongly related.

References about the common interest existing in both countries for the project and justification for the collaboration necessity with the foreign research team

The Romanian researchers included in this project have been undertaking for several years a rich scientific activity at national and international level in the research field of this project. This activity resulted, since 2004, into cooperation and partnerships with the Association of Francophone Universities (www.auf.org) through the program “Aspects de l’Etat de droit et démocratie”.

Mr. Ciprian MIHALI has lately focused his research on themes related to political and juridical philosophy. This is especially due to his active participation in the AUF (Association of Francophone Universities) juridical and human sciences’ scientific programs. Thus, Mr. Ciprian Mihali is member in the network of researchers “L’Etat de droit saisi par la philosophie” (www.edph.auf.org), which counts more than 150 members from over 20 countries and, in 2006 he was appointed international coordinator of this network.

Thus, as international coordinator, Mr. Mihali participates actively and periodically not only in research activities, but also in the management of scientific and university projects the Association of Francophone Universities develops through its thematic program “Aspects de l’Etat de droit et démocratie” (www.auf.org/rubrique20.html).

The SA side has a long-standing experience in the conception, management and delivery of such collaborative projects, under the aegis of the NRF. The team leader is a A1 rated scientist. With particular reference to rhetoric and the law, the SA side conducted in 2001-2003 a joint project with a French team at CNRS (NRF Gun 2069379), which resulted in verifiable outputs on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and included contributions by leading philosophers Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur (see http://www.rhetoricafrica.org/france.asp).

Actual level of knowledge and experience in research on national and international level in both countries, in the area of the proposed project

The study of the process of law making, of the plurality of normative sources and the critical re-evaluation of the principles and concrete manners of construction of the Etat de droit represent a new direction of interdisciplinary research at international level. It constitutes one of the main interests of the researchers included in this project. This new direction aims at elucidating through a critical perspective and not from a normative viewpoint the relevance of the juridical cultures in the construction of the juridical order and of the Etat de droit. And, it also takes into account the political evolution of the current societies and states, the reconfiguration of the power relations at global level, the appearance of new political, economic and financial actors on the world’s stage, and the evolution of international law. All these impose a rethinking of the manner in which the Etat de droit was established or re-established in the societies that had the experience of the totalitarian state ; a rethinking of the social, political and juridical specificities of this process – in relation to the recent past but also comparatively, for both experiences of South Africa post apartheid and Romania post communist societies.

Bibliography

1. Barbara Cassin et al. Vérité, réconciliation, réparation, Paris, Le Seuil, Le Genre Humain, vol 43, 2004.
2. L. Cohen-Tanugi – Le Droit sans l’Etat, 2007
3. Mireille Delmas-Marty – Le relatif et l’universel,2 vol., Seuil, 2006
4. Mireille Delmas-Marty – Pour un droit commun, Seuil, 1994
5. Ronald Dworkin – Taking Rights Seriously, 2007
6. Ronald Dworkin – Law’s Empire (Legal Theory), 2003
7. Michel Foucault – Sécurité, territoire, population, Seuil, 2004
8. Michel Foucault – « Il faut défendre la société », Seuil
9. Michel Foucault – Naissance de la biopolitique, Seuil, 2004
10. Simone Goyard-Fabre – Les principes philosophiques du droit politique moderne, PUF, 1997
11. Jürgen Habermas – Droit et démocratie. Entre faits et normes, Gallimard, 1997
12. M. van de Kerchove – Le système juridique entre ordre et désordre, 1988
13. Guillaume Le Blanc – Les maladies de l’homme normal, Ed. du Passant, 2004
14. Sanya Osha et al, Truth in Politics, special issue of Quest. An African Journal of Philosophy/Une Revue Africaine de Philosophie, XVI (1-2), 2002.
15. François Ost – Raconter la Loi : Aux sources de l’imaginaire juridique, 2003
16. François Ost – Dire le droit, faire justice, 2007
17. Philippe-Joseph Salazar and Erik Doxtader, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. The Fundamental Documents, with Erik Doxtader, Cape Town, David Philip, 2007.
18. Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Amnistier l’Apartheid, Paris, Le Seuil, Series : L’Ordre Philosophique, 2004.
19. Alain Supiot – Homo Juridicus, Seuil, 2006
20. Michel Troper – La Théorie du droit, le droit, l’Etat, 2001

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