Asymmetric adaptive legal cultures amongst minorities and Euro-migrants

Abstract

In the post-communist period, there has been considerable pressure towards a more convergent pan-European legal culture. Under international pressure, formal laws can be changed, but legal cultures that include public perceptions, attitudes, habits, conventions and even behaviour may be resistant to change imposed on them from outside. Formal laws may be changed, but legal cultures still reflect the legacy of communism. This study conducted in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, England and Norway confirms that public perceptions of law and public attitudes towards law, law observance and law enforcement still vary very sharply between the post-communist countries and others, with Ukraine and Norway being at the extremes. But we should not simply equate people with their countries of origin when studying legal cultures. The post-communist period coincides with a surge in personal mobility across Europe. While there is no guarantee that the large number of recent ‘Euro-migrants’ (defined as born in one European country, but now living in another) will necessarily adapt to the general legal culture of the majority in their new country of residence, their natural tendency is to do so. Over the long term, long-established Muslim minorities in Europe have adapted to the general legal culture in the country. So even though they continue to have their own particular concerns, the legal cultures of Muslim minorities tend to vary from one European country to another in much the same way as the legal cultures of the majorities in these countries do. To that extent, their legal cultures are at least as ‘country specific’ as they are ‘Muslim’. On a much shorter time scale, ‘Euro-migrants’ now moving more easily in both directions between former communist and non-communist countries tend to adapt quite quickly to the local legal culture in their new country of residence. Most importantly, however, is this adaptation both asymmetric and benign: the evidence here shows that Euro-migrants are more willing to adapt their legal culture when they move to a more law-abiding part of Europe, but they are less willing (or perhaps just less able) to adapt their legal culture when they move to a less law-abiding and more ‘informal’ society. Overall therefore, increasing migration across the old communist border is likely to exert a net positive influence on the popular legal culture across Europe taken as a whole.