The European Culture War and the Argumentation Theorist as War Journalist

The paper analyses discursive practices in the European Union’s Rule of Law conflict to inform normative assessment of the democratic standard of political argumentation in the EU. It argues that the escalating confrontation between ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ actors over the meaning of the Rule of Law, democracy, and the identity of the EU is best understood as a culture war (Hesova, 2025), in which deep value disagreements (de Ridder, 2021) are mobilized politically in a struggle for cultural hegemony (Bohle et al., 2024; Gramsci, 1971). Mapping the actor’s different narratives within this culture war requires empirical reconstruction of the arguments presented and rhetoric displayed, while assessing these narratives normatively requires a theory of justified and unjustified forms of political argumentation (Aikin, 2011; Cohen, 2004). Empirically, the paper analyzes argumentative patterns and rhetorical strategies in European Parliament debates (Van Eemeren, 2018; Garssen, 2016) on the Article 7 TEU procedure, to trace how liberal and illiberal camps advance rival conceptions of the Rule of Law (formal vs. substantive) and of the EU polity (national sovereignty vs. protection of common values). It shows how moral conflicts around migration, gender, minority rights are strategically mobilized to advance particular conceptions of the identity of Europe. The findings of the argumentative and rhetorical analysis inform normative debate by showing how actors in the Article 7 procedure empirically manifest their background assumptions about the Rule of Law, democracy, and the identity of the EU. Normatively, the paper asks how political theory should assess the democratic standard of political argumentation when empirical evidence suggests that deep disagreements leave no common ground for rational deliberation, and when dominant theories of democracy (deliberative and agonistic theories) presuppose precisely the liberal premises that are contested within the European culture war. It is highlighted how democratic norms connected to the argumentative ideal of participation can conflict with a majoritarian perspective of democracy. The paper proposes reconceiving the role of the argumentation theorist as that of a ‘culture war journalist’: a researcher who descriptively maps arguments and rhetoric, but, like just war theory, develops a normative account of war crimes, in this case unjust argumentation. The paper argues for a minimal standard of correctness centred on truthfulness (Zenker et al., 2024) that can be considered ideologically neutral. ‘Argumentative war crimes’ are defined as: argumentative practices that intentionally, unnecessarily and disproportionately, make the cognitive landscape 'uninhabitable' for all parties, for example by systematic spreading of disinformation or by constantly conflating empirical and ideological truth-claims. As such the paper provides a normative proposal for the assessment of the democratic standard of political argumentation in the EU, informed by an empirical analysis of argumentative patterns and rhetorical strategies in the Article 7 procedure debates in the European Parliament.