Michael Schäfer, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1953. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Researcher at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam.
Dutch/North Rhine Westphalian Fellow (1 September 1999 – 30 June 2000)
My project was to begin the work on drafting a book on the subject of “Civil Society, Constitutional Cultures and European Integration”. My research-project “European Integration, Democratic Legitimation and National Constitutional Traditions”, in which Hans-Joachim Schütz as a Duo-Fellow also participated, forms part of the larger research programme “Civil Societies compared: Germany and the Netherlands1850-2000”.
During my stay at NIAS, I completed work on two articles, work which I had started earlier: Memory in the Construction of Constitutions, forthcoming in: Ratio Juris, International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, and Rationalitäten von Modernität und Barbarei, forthcoming in: Bauhaus und Brasilia, Auschwitz und Hiroshima. Modernität und Barbarei im 20. Jahrhundert. During the year I also completed a small monograph Europäische Integration und nationale Verfassungskulturen, Deutschland und die Niederlande: Zivilgesellschaften im Vergleich, which examines German and Dutch normative presuppositions on democracy against the background of supranational developments. I wrote an introduction for the first conference-volume of our subject. While staying at NIAS, I was also invited to present my project at several universities and research institutes in England, Germany and Austria. Last but not least a conference-volume will be published in which related contributions will be written from a variety of political and legal perspectives. I greatly benefited from my stay at NIAS and, finally, I want to say that NIAS made unbeatable contributions to our Duo-Fellowship project. Without the opportunity to have intensive and frequent interaction, which the NIAS environment provided, Hans-Joachim Schütz and I, certainly would not have been able to make the conceptual and theoretical advances, also to new projects, which we achieved during those ten months,/P>.