Church,State, Resistance1

This article problematizes a separation of Church and State that is nevertheless identified as constitutive of politics. Democracy has come to manifest a tension between the ‘autonomy’ of the political and a ‘heteronomy’ that, exceeding rationalist or social contractarian accounts of our co‐existence, is here presented as an irreducible affect of our being together. Autonomy, it is argued, resists heteronomy through all representations of democracy; yet, by contrast, heteronomy resists autonomy, and does so with the force of this affect. So if civil religion is impossible – and if we know only too well where its realizations lead: by default, to republican celebration, or by excess, to fascism – then we must take up again, and from scratch, the question of the affect according to which we co‐exist.     

EUROPEANIZATION IN MANAGING EU AFFAIRS: BETWEEN DIVERGENCE AND CONVERGENCE,A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ESTONIA,HUNGARY AND SLOVENIA

Scholarly research into Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia has shown that the idiosyncrasies of the new EU countries (especially with respect to institutionalizing and centralizing the co‐ordination of core executives in managing EU affairs at home) persist. They are complemented by trends toward convergence (such as growing co‐ordination efforts and a common tendency: that of the prime minister to be the centre of co‐ordination). In this article external Europeanization pressures, national administrative traditions (the legacies of both pre‐communist and communist systems), and the patterns of party competition that cause variations in politico‐administrative relations, are tested as possible explanatory variables of differences seen in the three countries when managing EU affairs. While national administrative traditions play similar roles to those seen in old(er) member states by filtering the EU‘s impacts, the effect of patterns of party competition on politico‐administrative relations when managing EU affairs has been filtered by the accession states’ national priorities of integrating with the EU.