Abstract
The Charie Hebdo attack has yet again thrown into sharp relief one of the key challenges faced by contemporary multicultural societies: How best to balance the regulation of hate speech against the need to protect free speech? Rather than engaging with the often rather tired normative arguments on the issue, the volume edited by Maussen and Grillo invites us to investigate how and why different societies respond to this challenge and with what consequences. The opening chapter, written by the two editors, lays out the shortcomings of the existing (mostly normative and legal) discussion on the topic and argues for the benefits of a socio-political perspective that pays closer attention to the wider social context shaping the legal regulation of public speech. This perspective requires an investigation of a range of actors engaged in balancing free speech and hate speech – lawyers, legislators, pressure groups, academics, police, the media, minority group representatives and others – while taking into account the power relationships they are involved in. The individual contributions to the volume elaborate this approach in relation to a variety of national contexts and issues, including the parliamentary debate on blasphemy legislation in Denmark (Larsen), the development of the legislation protecting sexual minorities in Sweden (Bob), the interaction between free speech and religion in Norway (Mårtensson), the relationship between hate speech bans and socio-political changes in the Netherlands (Marloes and Noorloos), the changing notions of free speech among Norwegian elites (Bangstad), the differences and similarities between the politics of hate speech regulation in the context of the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights (Bleich) and the implications of legal restrictions on representing historical events (such as the Holocaust) in the European Union (Kučs). The concluding chapter offers a conceptual framework for a comparative analysis of free speech and hate speech in different national contexts, which takes into account the power asymmetries in each setting (Bader). While the contributions often mention the importance of the media as one of the actors, this is clearly an area that requires more focused attention and engagement from communication and media scholars.