This is a collection of essays, mainly from the field of law, that are devoted to discussing political rights in contemporary Europe. The general focus is on how these rights have to be reconsidered in view of the “stress” resulting from the eastern enlargement of the European Union, on the one hand, and the global developments after September 11, on the other hand. The Europeanization of the rights discourse is a topic that plays an important role throughout the whole book, whose thematic coherence is otherwise relatively loose.

In a brief introduction, Wojciech Sadurski elaborates on the concept of political rights, defining these as “rights that are instrumental, and perhaps indispensable, to the participation of citizens in the exercise of political power in their society” (p. 1). This makes for a rather general approach. Such generality is obviously related to the very nature of the topic under scrutiny, and one may agree with the view that any distinction among different types of rights is highly contingent. Still, it would have helped if the editor had undertaken a more systematic initial effort at delimiting what constitutes the core of political rights in contrast with other types of rights (civil, social, cultural), an effort that would have required an explicit discussion of “the political.” At the same time, it is a clear merit of the volume that it does not take political rights for granted, and shows how their contours and content are subject to substantial changes in the context of contemporary liberal democracies.

The volume's first two chapters share the ambition of setting theoretical foundations for an appropriate understanding of political rights today. Drawing from legal and political philosophy, Michel Rosenfeld advocates comprehensive pluralism as a theoretical perspective that is dynamic enough to transcend the normative dichotomy of monism and relativism, thereby integrating key elements of liberalism, republicanism, and communitarianism. Accordingly, the main role of political rights when it comes to assessing different views of the common good is to offer mechanisms for handling conflicts. For Rosenfeld, comprehensive pluralism thereby involves “fighting at once on two fronts” (p. 19): As different conceptions of the good deserve equal recognition, we have to create a framework that enhances the dialogue between competing conceptions. The fight will be conducive to our developing a common political self that can sustain unity in diversity. The readable and stimulating argumentation does not make entirely clear, however, how the second-order principles of comprehensive pluralism translate into justifiable rules in the first-order realm of politics when the interpretation of the scope of political rights is at stake. When discussing how to combat terrorism or how to handle attempts at secession, Rosenfeld cannot but rely upon contextual evidence that is inherently contested. Yet, how this context should be interpreted is ultimately not derivable from meta-principles but is, rather, a matter of an institutionally controlled use of democratic power.

In the following chapter, Damian Chalmers addresses the book's topic in innovative ways, offering a contribution that is both theoretically grounded and empirically relevant. He reflects critically upon the two main strands along which political rights have developed in EU law: the articulation of elements of Union statehood (however peculiar these may be) and the regulation of the European market society. Considering recent developments, Chalmers sees the second strand clearly as the prevailing one and offers a rather skeptical picture of the EU as an institutional setting in which the imperative of protecting the Common Market against presumed or real external threats overrides the emancipatory potential inherent to the principle of mutual recognition and equal opportunities legislation, thereby producing a layer of identities (illegal migrants, asylum seekers) that are extremely vulnerable in contrast with those of “unsuspicious” market participants.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide the reader with detailed descriptions of the actual legal dynamics involved when political rights are restricted in present-day Europe. Whereas Victor Ferreres focuses on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in delimiting freedom of expression, Eva Brems presents recent cases of party closure in several European countries, discussing them in the light of an emerging European standard according to which the freedom of political association is interpreted.

The volume's last two chapters take the reader to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region that has experienced a dramatic redefinition of political rights in the transition from communist rule to liberal democracy. Moreover, the eastern enlargement of the EU has turned the CEE countries into a laboratory for analyzing the impact of external supervision—under the common denominator of the “conditionality” of accession—on the implementation of political rights. Jiří Přibáň and Sadurski offer a systematic account of the reframing of political citizenship in the area since 1989. They argue convincingly that it is ultimately impossible to draw a clear line between the internal and external dimensions of this process: “Democratic transition coincided in time, and was functionally interrelated with aspects of Europeanization” (p. 206). From the multiple examples they use to make their case, one might conclude that the adoption of a common political rights vocabulary was very much linked to the role of the European level, while the specific uses made of this vocabulary (in terms of limiting the freedom of political speech, monitoring political parties with dubious democratic credentials, or dealing with the issue of lustration) remained strongly connected with particular (i.e., country-specific) paths of postcommunist democratization.

Conditionality also is an important concept in Gwendolyn Sasse's thorough analysis of the political rights of national minorities in the CEE. The piece benefits from a compact theoretical introduction, which shows the limitations of the traditional language of political rights for grasping the complex realities of majority–minority relations, a field in which it is difficult to discern clear-cut identities that would allow for an unproblematic attribution of distinct political rights and obligations to distinct groups. Political rights presuppose a collectivity whose members are entitled to make legitimate use of these rights. To determine who belongs to it, to relate identity to demos, may well be the first critical step in bringing the very politics of political rights to the fore. Drawing on a rich body of comparative material, which stretches from Latvia to Bulgaria, Sasse shows how a range of quite different constellations and conflict potentials is hidden under the common conceptual framework of the “official” European discourse on minorities and their protection. This is an illuminating complementary perspective to the legal approach that predominates in the other parts of the book. In addition, the chapter gives an instructive and balanced overview of the main recent developments in the field of minority politics and policies in the CEE.

All in all, this is a notable collection, in which experts on human rights and constitutional law make substantial contributions to the updating and refining of our understanding of political rights.