Aside from the controversy surrounding the proposed inclusion of an Invocatio Dei in the preamble to the European Union's (EU's) defunct Draft Constitution, a more muted controversy centred on the inclusion of a provision for structured dialogue between the institutions of the EU and communities of faith and conviction. This provision for dialogue, previously Article I.52.3 of the Draft Constitution, was retained in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 as Article 17.3. The following article evaluates the logic for the inclusion of such a dialogue provision, focusing on the rationale of the European Commission body tasked with its coordination, as well as its potential role in intercultural understanding, the crystallisation of a European identity and core values, and the promotion of religious freedom and social justice. The putative imperatives examined are found to be insufficient to justify a differentiated dialogue provision.

In 2005, the European Commission formally inaugurated a "structured dialogue" between European institutions and major faith traditions and nonconfessional bodies in Europe. The provision for dialogue was envisaged ostensibly as a mechanism to include religious and non-confessional perspectives in the ongoing construction of the wider European project. The language of "dialogue," consensus-seeking, and mutual learning dominates both religious and political justification for this formalized provision. Analysis considers emerging praxis in the intervening period (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) to determine the extent to which consensus-seeking has prevailed over the role of power and interests. Findings indicate that a number of elements relative to the configuration of dialogue praxis have severely inhibited the communicative potential of the provision enshrined in Article 17.

Even before the controversy over the Invocatio Dei, proposed for inclusion in the preamble to the European Union’s defunct Draft Constitution, the role of religion in European integration had moved toward the centre of political consciousness. As early as 1992 the then European Commission President, Jacques Delors, had stated that ‘If in the next twenty years we have not given a soul to Europe, given it spirituality and meaning, then the game will be up’.1 Throughout the remainder of his tenure, and beyond it, corporate religion was given an increasingly prominent role in strategic and affective considerations of further European integration. This new role for religious associations has now been incorporated into the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty, where ‘open, transparent and regular dialogue’ has been formally established. The article will consider the question of European integration and the role of ‘public’ religion within this by disentangling two predominating thematic approaches, and thereafter discussing their inter‐ (and intra‐) thematic tensions along with the potential avenues that they offer for future research.

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Although the most recent manifestation of conflict in Rakhine can be traced to the coordinated attack on Myanmar security forces in August 2017 by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (hereafter ARSA), it goes without saying that the problem has a longer history. For this paper a corpus of official Myanmar government sources was examined qualitatively using the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method. Within the official pronouncements of the Myanmar state since August 2017 we can discern the discursive strategies deployed to balance the competing pressures of national and international legitimation of the Myanmar government. In name and through action, Myanmar has marginalized the Rohingyas. However, beyond this obvious imperative additional and more subtle strategies have been deployed in Myanmar’s official discourse, which attempts to position the Myanmar state as a neutral arbiter in a subnational dispute and one that seeks to distance itself from previous political arrangements. The paper focuses on these other discursive strategies which evince conformity to undercurrents of socio-cultural pressures from grassroots extremist Buddhist actors within Myanmar. Ultimately, there is no escaping Official Myanmar’s responsibility for the status and plight of the Rohingya. The prognosis for external pressure to exert any normative influence on Myanmar will be limited. The official discourse betrays the ongoing attempts by the new government to balance these competing pressures at the expense of genuine neutrality and its responsibilities.