*** Europe, donner corps à une idée - Europe, giving shape to an idea. General Secretariat of the Council of the European Communities (European Publications Office) and Anthem Press (75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK. Tel: (44) 207 401 4200- Fax: +44 207 401 4201. 2009, 304 pp, €25. ISBN 978-1-8433-1829-3. For the French language version, the European Publications Office and Bruylant (67 rue de la Régence, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 5129842 -Fax: 5119477 - Internet: http://www.bruylant.be ) ISBN 978-2-8027-2841-2.
This publication has fabulous layout and content, and would have made an excellent Christmas present. Christmas and the time for giving gifts may be over now but there will be plenty more Christmases and present-giving opportunities to come and this book would certainly make an excellent gift for all the EU institutions and EU offices in the Member States to provide for their visitors, whether high-ranking non-Europeans or less famous Europeans.
Why am I so enthusiastic? Very simply, due to the highly judicious approach taken in this book, destined to become a collector's item. Four years ago, the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU published for its own strictly internal purposes, a non-commercial publication on the history of European integration ideas and projects. Wonderful, but why not let the general public read it? The question was raised in circles close to the Council of Ministers and this new book is the answer. In the future, ordinary Europeans will be able to buy the book from any good bookshop at a deliberately low price for a coffee table book (a price set to encourage wide readership). The publication is due to a praise-worthy public-private partnership and the book is distributed by the 'Forum des Editeurs de l'Union européenne,' a European Publications Office initiative bringing together private sector publishing houses from the Member States and EU institutional publishers. The book is also available in German (from the Nomos publishing house) and other translations will be published in the future (if other publishers come forward). It is a tangible move in the direction of the diversity that is the essence of European unity and was the aim of many of the EU's precursors.
The second reason to be enthusiastic is the sheer graphic and iconographic quality of this large book and its editorial prowess. High quality paper and printing and creative and painstaking layout make it a delight to behold, adorned by some two hundred iconographic documents sourced from institutions as varied as the European Union's photo libraries, the United Nations Library in Geneva, Belgium's Royal Library and public and private collections. These flashes of visual delight from the past take the form of excerpts from original books by authors who have penned ideas about how to get Europe united down the years, from the Middle Ages to the times of the EU's founding fathers. ' Architects rather than visionaries predominate, i.e. those who chose to cast their ideas in constitutional form', explains the Honorary Director General of the Council, Jean-Paul Jacqué.
The final and most important reason to be cheerful is the concrete formulation, as some would have it, that the 'only' merit of the people who will remain known as the founding fathers of Europe is that were the first 'utopia-makers' to have managed 'the transition from utopia to reality'! Since the time of Dante, early Europeanisers down the centuries neglected to consider issues like comitology (we may forgive them for that) or an institution 'higher' than sovereign states with a limited area of power that would be called the 'High Authority' at first, and later known as the European Commission. This omission clearly shows why they were unable to turn their utopias unto reality. All the areas currently of concern to the EU, like division of powers, subsidiarity (back in "De Monarchia," Dante explained that the same rules could not be applied to both 'Scythians (…) who endure an almost unbearable intensity of cold' and 'Garamantes, since they live in the equatorial zone (…) and because of the excessive heat of the air cannot bear to cover themselves with clothes'), keeping national identities alive, decision-making and Europe's final frontiers, were written about by the 'old Europeanisers' who believed a united Europe was desirable. There is a short biography for each of them, and the extracts from their writings are accompanied by a commentary. All shared the view that 'the organisation of Europe is the precondition for peace,' and it is a fact that without the indefatigable intellectual travails of these visionaries of Europe down the centuries, 'the founding fathers would have been faced with a blank page.'
A final note - by nature, any selection is arbitrary. Fortunately, this book enables readers to discover renowned and forgotten thinkers (philosophers, lawyers, publicists and politicians), some of whom have simply been ignored in the original Member States. Other thinkers, sometimes better known than the ones actually selected, have been left out. I would mention just one of those left out, namely Machiavelli. The following comment of his, while running at a low ebb of when it comes to positive thinking, does provide the key to understanding a number of problems that have hampered the European revolution for the past sixty years: "It must be considered that there is nothing more arduous to work upon, nothing less likely to be successful and nothing more dangerous to venture upon than to set up new institutions; because he who introduces them makes enemies of all those who profit from the old order, and he only has extremely lukewarm defenders in those who would profit from the new order. Their lukewarm support is due in part to their fear of their adversaries (who have the law on their side), and in part to the lack of faith of men who do not really believe in anything new until they see it already achieved and proved in practice. How many times this has conspired to make it easy for opponents to attack and to attack so ardently while the others defend in such a lack-lustre manner; such that the edifice collapses with them".
Michel Theys
*** CLAIRE LOBET-MARIS, ROBIN LUCAS, BENJAMIN SIX (Eds.): Variations sur la confiance. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes (1 av. Maurice, B-1050 Brussels. Tel: (41-32) 3761717-- Fax: 3761727 - email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Philosophie & Politique" series, No. 18. 2009, 206 pp. ISBN 978-90-5201-525-5.
Without trust, it is not possible to live together in groups, in society. Trust, however, is rather a fickle concept, explains Claire Lobet-Maris in the preface to this fine work picking its way between ethics, psychology, economics, sociology and philosophy and striking a balance between irrational leaps and reasonable wagers. The first merit of this book, the highlight of a one-year seminar at the interdisciplinary Technology Assessment Unit at the 'Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix de Namur' in Belgium on trust in governance ("Confiance et Gouvernance: s'engager dans un monde incertain") is that it starts by trying to define the polysemitic concept of trust by examining its epistemological foundations through the description of philosophical and sociological approaches. In the second section of the book, the authors examine trust in various social, political and technological contexts, looking at the practical conditions and the limits to trust when facing the challenges and uncertainty of modern life characterised by globalisation, segmentation and the media-isation of social arenas. They demonstrate the dead-end that the traditional recourse to expertise leads to these days as an attempt to ensure both public and private decisions are safe. Sociologist Claire Lobet-Maris says this calls for "new decision-making paths capable of supporting the required collective regulations between global and local contexts". This is examined in the third part of the book, that calls for a genuine reworking of the foundations of trust in innovative forms of governance and collective regulation, failing which democracy will not survive the crisis of loss of trust between citizens and politicians and will give way to the 'dark destiny of individualisation, turning in oneself and one's own identity and social violence.' The book combines the views of philosophers, sociologists and communication science specialists, showing that while it is not too late, the time has certainly come for a bit of creative thinking…
(MT)
*** CESAREAO RODRIGUEZ-AGUILAR DE PRAT: Political Parties and European Integration. Presses Interuniversitaires européennes - Peter Lang (see above). 2009, 273 pp, €35-50. ISBN 978-90-5201-535-4.
Written by a senior lecturer in European integration politics at Barcelona University, this book aims to fill a gap in the research in national political parties in the European context. When the potential consequences of the European Union on political parties are studied, this is usually done in terms of relations with the European Parliament (European elections and the characteristics of the EP's political parties (groupings)) with very few authors examining the European views of national parties, their political agendas and manifestoes and concrete action. It has been demonstrated that the EU impacts on the structures of countries and therefore also on political parties and this is the area examined in this book. In the first section, the author examines the role of political parties in the European Union through their relationship with political parties at the European Parliament and the way European parties are structured. He describes the reasons behind problems facing political parties within the EU institutions compared with the state institutions of the Member State where the parties have a greater role. The second part of the book is empirical, comprising an analysis of the programmes and manifestoes of political parties represented at the European Parliament from the six Member States with the highest populations. These parties are then listed in terms of what they propose in their 2004 European election manifestoes according to the traditional left-right cleavage and also according to the supranational-intergovernmental split.
(NDu)
*** ENRICO BORGHETTO, FABIO FRANCHINO: The Role of Subnational Authorities in the Implementation of EU Directives. Editions IHS (Institute for Advanced Studies, 56 Stumpergasse, A-1060 Vienna, Austria. Internet: http://www.ihs.ac.at ). "Political Science Series," No. 119. 2009, 27 pp.
This work examines the formal role of sub-national authorities when it comes to implementing European regulatory policies. To date, most research in this domain has focussed on the formulation of policy and the implementation of regional funding. This time, however, the authors expand the field of research to include the transposition of EU directives at infranational level. Infranational level authorities have a secondary but nevertheless growing role in the implementation of EU directives with a growing impact in particular in environmental and social policies. The study shows that in reality, decentralised countries are highly involved at sub-national level but the more action at sub-national level, the lesser the likelihood of easily finding transposition measures. The author points out that there is greater involvement at sub-national level in countries whose regions have an elected government and areas where there are special agreements on relations with the European Union.
(NDu)
*** MATTHIAS THEODOR VOGT, JAN SOKOL, BEATA OCIEPKA, DETLEF POLLACK, BEATA MIKOLAJCZYK (Eds.): Peripherie in der Mitte Europas. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, Postfach 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3751727 - email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http: //http://www.peterlang.net ). 2009, 375 pp, €52.80. ISBN 978-3-631-58031-8
This is the second book in a series of four by authors who studied at the Pontes College set up by the foreign ministers of Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland to investigate solidarity from the prism of several scientific disciplines. This second volume examines the relationship between centre and periphery against the backdrop of the European Union and its enlargement to the East. The first essays consider the various paradigms studied in the rest of the book, including 'periphery' and 'frontier'. There is then a historical analysis on the region where East Europe and West Europe meet. The issues of identity and democracy in the EU's new Member States are then discussed, as is the German question. The book ends with an in-depth discussion of "provincialisation".
(JD)
*** Eyes on Europe. La gestion de crise par l'Union européenne. ASBL Eyes Europe (c/o Institut d'Etudes Européennes, 39 av. Franklin Roosevelt, B-1050 Brussels. email: eyesoneurope@gmail.com - Internet: http://www.eyesoneurope.eu ). 2009, No. 11, 80 pp, €4.
Written, edited and published by a group of students and post-grads at the 'Université Libre de Bruxelles,' Geneva University and Berlin University, this series in English, French and German casts fresh light in its serious and striking articles because they are written by young people. This issue takes a cross-disciplinary approach to how the European Union is managing the economic crisis, with essays by post-grads, lecturers and politicians. They examine political crises in Europe and elsewhere in the world rather than focussing strictly on the credit crunch and the economic crisis, also casting their eyes over the environmental crisis. Contributing politicians include Javier Solana, Charles Michel and Pervenche and academics include Eric Remacle, Philippe Van Parijs and Alessandro Turrini. The paper version is accompanies by an interactive Eyes on Europe website where articles from the newsletter and other material not published in the paper edition can be found. An excellent initiative!
(JD)