*** FLORA GOUDAPPEL: The Effects of EU Citizenship. Economic, Social and Political Rights in a Time of Constitutional Change. T. M. C. Asser Press (Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK. Tel: (44-1223) 326050 - Fax: 315052 - Internet: http://www.asserpress.nl and http://www.cambridge.org ). 2010, 225 p, £50. ISBN 978-90-6704-278-9.
Citizenship is a burning issue in Europe, especially in the light of Hungary's decision to give Hungarian passports to people of Hungarian origin living outside the country's current borders. Against this backdrop, citizenship is adding an extra area of complexity in a field where citizenship already clashes with nationalism. Hence the excellent initiative by Flora Goudappel, senior lecturer in European law at the Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to examine this innovation in the Maastricht Treaty that has continued to thrive in the wake of case law from the European Court of Justice.
Does European citizenship provide anything new on top of citizenship of a specific country or does it devalue traditional citizenship? Is it true that European citizenship is the same as national citizenship but with additional rights? Has adding European citizenship to the bagatelle of EU rights given a new impulse to the free circulation of individuals and Europeans' opportunities or has it given rise to an uneven playing field among citizens? What influence will the Lisbon Treaty have in this connection? These are some of the questions carefully answered in detail in the book, whose diagnosis is based on the three-pronged approach developed by T. H. Marshall in the middle of the last century in his book Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950). In the light of the rising power of citizenship in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the author points out that civic rights were the first rights to take root, leading on to political rights, which then fed into social rights, all of them going on to make up citizenship. As far as Flora Goudappel is concerned, although the same development logic was not fully echoed in the European Union, the fact remains that these three types of rights were at least partially present from the very first days of the European integration process, although they developed at different speeds. The method is therefore wholly pertinent for gauging the substance and scope of European citizenship in reality. The author uses other assessments too, examining the situation of non-EU nationals living as legal immigrants in the European Union, and the impact of the gradual development of the EU as an 'area of freedoms, security and justice,' not to mention the fight against terrorism and how it has affected national and European citizenship.
This very detailed investigation leads the author to make some intriguing statements. She says that European citizens who decide to stay put are the worst off because their political rights have been weakened by the way power has been delegated to the European level because the European Parliament does not have the same powers as national parliaments in this connection, along with the action of the Council of Ministers and also, under the Lisbon Treaty, the invitation to national parliaments to enter the European arena reducing this 'democratic deficit' to an extent. Likewise, when it comes to individual freedoms, sedentary citizens do not really gain anything from the European Union's action in the field of justice and home affairs, the fight against terror being the most problematic area in this connection. The author argues that stay-putters only benefit from European citizenship in the domain of social rights, like sexual equality, but even here, they have fewer rights than European citizens who decide to move to another EU country and therefore benefit from extra rights in the wake of broad rulings on the issue by the European Court of Justice. To sum up, the rights connected with citizenship have been extended under the influence of Europe but only citizens living in another Member State than their own are able to make full use of them.
Pierre Bouvier
*** MARTIN RODAN: Notre culture européenne, cette inconnue. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, CH-2542 Pieterlen, Switzerland. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 2009, 363 pp, €63-50. ISBN 978-3-0343-0028-5.
If you want to do more in the summer holidays than simply lie around sunning yourself on a beach, you could do worse than read this book. It tells the story of a man who applies for a European passport and has to answer a series of tests about his understanding of European culture. He chats with his 'advisors' in the book, including Clarus, an encyclopaedia, Golem, a computer, Frigo, a refrigerator, Diapo, a slide-projector, and Ahuva, an inflatable doll(!) - who tell him he will need a vast array of knowledge to understand European culture. He takes up the challenge of trying to convince his advisors that knowing a handful of the descendants of Homer and Moses, down to twentieth-century German philosopher Constantin Brunner, will suffice for a good basic understanding. His reasoning is simple - our contemporaries are so old and so many of them are further removed from us than Darwin's Neanderthals that surely it cannot be argued that Hitler and Stalin are closer to us than Socrates and Jesus because if so, we are further removed from the sources of humanity than we were throughout any of the preceding generations. Born in Slovakia, the author now lectures at Hadassah College and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem after studying French literature, philosophy and classics. In this book, he makes an odyssey through the cultural foundations of Europe, embracing with infinite erudition Homeric culture (Homer, the Gods of Olympus, plastic arts (external beauty), poetry, inner beauty, pre-Socratean thinkers (abstract beauty), Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander and the Roman civilisation), the culture of Moses (Moses, the prophets of the Bible, Jesus and medieval civilisation) and European culture (the Renaissance, Spinoza and 'the Age of Reason,' Romanticism and Idealism, the century of genocide, the 'great unknown, Constantin Brunner' and the global civilisation of the present day). Why make such a journey? For a very simple reason: Westerners have a tendency to imagine that perfection is located in times past (whose sufferings we have forgotten) or to project perfection into some point in the future (whose sufferings are as yet unknown). But in our hearts, each and every one of us knows, argues the author, that the present can only take place in the imperfect. In order to understand European culture, it is therefore crucial that one understands one's past, despite it being a composite past, a 'passé composé'… The style of the book will occasionally irritate because it is dripping with word games like the fact that Europe is divided into as many countries (each of which keeps its own landscape (paysage) but none of which is a wise country (pays sage)) as periods of time, none of them harmonious: 'Our old continent often behaves like an old incontinent.' Likewise, some readers will not enjoy following all the details of the voyage, but all the same, this unusual book cuts across classifications and will be precious reading!
(MT)
*** JAAN MIKK, MARIKA VEISSON, PIRET LUIK (Eds.): Teenagers in Estonia: Values and Behaviour. Peter Lang (see above). Estonian Studies in Education , No. 1. 2009, 191 pp, €37.20. ISBN 978-3-631-59695-1.
Written by academic experts in education, this book examines in detail the cultural and ethical values of students in Estonia, values that influence their behaviour like the taking of drugs, resorting to violence and bullying and promiscuity. Other articles look at how teenagers spend their time and how they feel about their studies. A book aimed solely at experts in the field of education.
(PBo)
*** ROSSELLA RAGAZZI: Walking on Uneven Paths. The Transcultural Experience of Children entering Europe in the Years 2000. Peter Lang (see above). 'Transversales' series, No. 25. 2009, 222 pp, €40-60. ISBN 978-3-0343-0042-1.
This is an inter-disciplinary study of the problem of child immigrants, in which the author analyses the various types of European immigration agencies and the questions they ask of child immigrants to Europe at the start of the twenty-first century. One of the study's main characteristics is the use of audiovisual material alongside the usual text (the book comes with a DVD) to enable empirical analysis to be made based on solid evidence. After the first section in which the author explains her methodology and the scope of her work, the book describes how immigrant reception systems in France and Ireland determine the ideas the child immigrants form of citizenship, social class and class inequality. The author takes advantage of this to compare the two countries' approaches in areas like language assimilation, life in a 'segregating' classroom, children's experiences and contact with inter-cultural communication modes and the extent to which somatisation occurs in the learning of new languages and new cultures. The final section links the anthropological analysis of these themes with the children's own accounts in interviews, providing a more nuanced approach than the norm. The author ends by considering the influence of a political situation (France of 1997-98) on how child immigrants view themselves.
(NDu)
*** JOSEF LANGER, JURICA PAVICIC, NIKSA ALFIREVIC (Eds.): Knowledge Region: Alps-Adriatic Challenges. Volume I - General Perspective. Peter Lang (see above). 2009, 205 pp, €36.40. ISBN 978-3-631-58558-0.
Following on from symposiums in Croatia and Austria three years ago, this book does not simply study the idea of knowledge-based development from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, but also studies the question from a specific regional context - that of the Alps and the Adriatic - a single region under the Hapsburgs for many a long year, followed by ideological divisions and now covering Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and part of Italy. The authors examine the notion of knowledge beyond the economic dimension to which it was reduced by the Lisbon Strategy, aiming to situate it in a much wider societal context. Yrjö-Paavo Häyrynen (of the psychology department of Joensuu University in Finland) looks at the predominance of 'scientific knowledge' in contemporary society and suggests that art and radical imagination should be incorporated into the notion. Legal expert Vittorio Olgiati (of Macerata University in Italy) looks at the complex web of connections between knowledge, power and education in the European Union, while sociologist Josef Langer (of Klagenfurt University in Austria) introduces the book's main theme, commenting that the region's rich intellectual heritage could be a great selling point. Other authors examine various aspects of cross-border cooperation and competition in the region, focussing on the education system.
(PBo)
*** MICHEL PIRON: L'Allemagne, le pari de l'intelligence territoriale partagée. Commission des Affaires européennes de l'Assemblée nationale (Boutique de l'Assemblée nationale, 7 rue Aristide Briand, F-75007 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 40630033 - Internet: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr ). 'Documents d'Information,' No. 2521. 2010, 61 pp, €3-50. ISBN 978-2-11-125928-7.
In this newsletter, a French parliamentarian examines Germany's political system, describing it as combining geographical intelligence with constant concern to find the best territorial level at which to carry out any given task - in other words, proper application of the subsidiarity principle. He detects huge political voluntarism when it comes, for example, to big supermarket chains, because competition is viewed as an important aim but not an end in itself. In this connection, Michel Piron hopes that Germany's political control over supermarkets will not be challenged by the European Commission under competition law.
(MT)
*** Dokumente / Documents. Revue du dialogue franco-allemand. Verlag Dokumente (86 Dottendorfer Strasse, D-53129 Bonn. Tel: (49-228) 92129365 - Fax: 690385 - Internet: http://www.dokumente-documents.info ). 2010, No. 2, 114 pp, €12-90. Annual subscription: €32-90.
This issue of a review founded by Jean du Rivau includes a special report on General de Gaulle's speech of 18 June 1940, using it to analyse various Franco-German aspects of the Resistance (during World War Two), although the two countries may well view the same aspects from a different angle. Another very interesting article is a piece by Séverine Féraud on identity questions in France and Germany. The authors express concern at the impact of standardisation of national identity in Germany and an inward-looking identity withdrawal in France, which could impact on the solidarity required in the European context. They also examine the role that these new aspects of identity (also found in other Member States) may have when it comes to developing European identity.
(MT)