Issue 1
The inaugural issue of the Interdisciplinary Review of ValEUs critically examines the meaning and use of "European values" within the EU's normative and geopolitical landscape. Drawing on the first workshop of the Jean Monnet Policy Network ValEUs, held at University Paris 8 in June 2024, the collection brings together historians, political scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars to interrogate how values such as democracy, human dignity, freedom, and solidarity have been constructed, contested, and instrumentalized by the European Union.
Rather than simply cataloguing gaps between EU rhetoric and policy, contributors develop a mode of critique that is diagnostic, immanent, and prospective—identifying what needs questioning, applying transparent standards, and drawing out implications for both scholarship and politics. Essays range from a genealogy of "the West" as a contested concept, to postcolonial and decolonial readings of Eurocentrism, to grounded studies of migrant solidarity in southern Italy, populist reframings of Europe in Hungary, and the selective application of "democracy clauses" in EU–Latin American trade agreements.
Together, the contributions argue for a dynamic, constructionist understanding of European values that are continually reappropriated, renegotiated, and reinterpreted in specific local and geopolitical contexts. The issue opens with a welcome statement from the IRV editor Randall Halle framing the journal's mission, and closes with an afterword by Claske Vos synthesizing the workshop's key axes of inquiry.
