*** Politique étrangère. Institut français des relations internationales (27 rue de la Procession, F-75740 Paris Cedex 15. Tel: (33-1) 40157000 - email: pe@ifri-org - Internet: http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.org ). 2010, No. 3, 222 pp, €2-. Annual subscription: €75 (France), €115 (elsewhere). ISBN 978-2-86592-764-7.
People may not like the idea, but it is a fact that everything is political, and in the European Union, although the same people (and others) may not like it, possibly the majority of people these days even, political matters are always decided by the institutional. The special report in this review so close to Thierry de Montbrial looks at the impact of the crisis (crises plural) on the European Union and bears witness to this stubborn fact. Over and above the intrinsically technical aspects of toxic issues cluttering the desk, it is the political visions enshrined in the institutional framework of the time that actually explain the situation we are in…
As a starting point, the first analysis made by Alain Lamassoure in a piece on Europe under the Lisbon Treaty is particularly interesting from this angle because he judges matters as a politically committed player who is far from impartial and whose sole trump card, he explains, is the fact that he can compare his impressions of a test pilot (his is currently chair of the European Parliament's Budgets Committee) with the plans of the engineer who worked on the blue sheet, in that he used to be a member of the Convention that prepared for the Lisbon Treaty. Unsurprisingly, this former French minister does not look down on the Lisbon Treaty, seeing it as "an added compromise between the federal and the confederal models". He even sees "four major areas of progress" in the treaty. Firstly, the European Union now has its own leaders - the President of the European Council, the President of the Commission… when he or she is elected for the first time (in 2014) by the European Parliament (for the moment, José Manuel Barroso "still sees himself as elected by the heads of state"…) and the position held by Catherine Ashton - although this "triumvirate" was not the "best or the final solution but rather a crucial stage that gives Europe its own leaders at last, with their own legitimacy, who are different from the national leaders". The other areas of progress he detects are the fact that the legislative process has been made efficient and fully democratic, the "breakdown of powers between the European Union and its Member States has been rationalised, clarified and is now subject to an unusual form of scrutiny by national parliaments, which are invited to be the guardians of their own patch" and, finally, that ordinary people are not longer simply the people 'managed by the European Union' but have "become real citizens" through the direct initiative law. Two hundred days on, however, Alain Lamassoure points out that "there is clearly nobody in the European cockpit”! He argues that the "extremely serious public debt crisis that hit the European Union in the first quarter has not been used to ensure the Europe's voice is heard at last". Clearly, the EU remained silent when it could have "made the most of its collective success" and demonstrated the new treaty's value-added. Who is at fault? Herman Van Rompuy, who is "deliberately ignoring the media dimensions of the job he is inventing". Jean-Claude Juncker, who "has been politically weakened by the position Luxembourg is taking in the financial crisis". The fact that if the real European figurehead is to be the President of the Commission, then we will have to wait for the person anointed by the European Parliament in 2014… Fortunately the Lisbon Treaty put an end to the "institutional alibi" and, because the treaty cannot be altered any further, "lawyers are busy examining it the way aruspices would pick over the entrails of a chicken the day before a battle". This is why the European Union has finally managed to deal with its responsibilities in recent months, because the power of Europe, "even though it is collective and even though it is anonymous," has "finally carried more weight than the sum of the weaknesses of its 27 constituent parts".
Is that true? Three other articles tone down this viewpoint. Setting out questions and hypotheses about the future of the eurozone, Denise Flouzat-Osmont d'Amilly, professor of economics at 'Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne,' points out that "the euro was viewed by the various governments in the eurozone as a cost-free collective good," with each country "acting as a freeloader, carrying out its own policies without worrying about the impact on its partners". In the same spirit, Daniela Schwarzer - head of the European integration research department at the German Institute for International Affairs and Security - observes that when the crisis management measures were decided upon, the Member States (all the Member States) acted "according to their national interests, seeing cross-border considerations as secondary". Hans Stark, secretary general of the Franco-German relations research committee at IFRI and lecturer at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, explains that the European Union is being built "less on a common project and mutual trust than on the fear of violence erupting and clashes breaking out if there were no integration project". The crisis in the first few months of the year can therefore be put down at the end of the day to "chronic lack of sufficient European integration, particularly on economic governance issues".
The editorialist writes that the increasingly frequent raft of "reflexes to win the most for one's own country are clearly becoming suicidal" although the aruspices have, for the moment, managed to preserve the most important aspects. It is necessary to go further. How? Making better use of 'strengthened cooperation' is one of the ways recommended by Lamassoure, who says it is important to "find a way of getting parliaments involved in the economic governance of the European Union". Above all, he argues, it is now crucial to change tack on the EU budget, which has been manifesting a withdrawal from European integration for two decades now: "Some 85% of the common budget now comes from the Member States. A fundamentally anti-Community system that encourages everyone to demand a fair return." Pointing out that the debt crisis brought Europe closer to the moment of truth, Alain Lamassoure ends by calling on the President of the European Council or the Belgian Presidency to "convene an EU financial conference to match on budget issues what the Convention on the Future of Europe did for the political institutions". The Lisbon Treaty is certainly not the end of the matter. Far from it!
Michel Theys
*** FRANCIS DELPEREE, FREDERIC DOPAGNE: Le dialogue parlementaire Belgique-Europe. Etablissements Emile Bruylant (67 rue de la Régence, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 5129842 - Fax: 5119477 - email: jean@bruylant.be - Internet: http://www.bruylant.be ). 2010, 154 pp, €45. ISBN 978-2-8027-2958-7.
Currently deputy speaker of the Belgian Senate, Francis Delpérée is one of the country's most influential constitutionalists. Along with one of his former colleagues from the Université Catholique de Louvain, he throws the cat amongst the pigeons in this book on Belgium's relationship with Europe. The authors assert that: 'Respect of national constitutions - their authorities, their traditions, or even their values - has not yet become one of the European Union's major concerns,' and they point the finger at the drafters and, more specifically, the signatories of the Lisbon Treaty. They explain that Member States lost sight of the constitutional framework in which they are supposed to work and they ignored the arrangements of national institutions under the constitutional framework when they decided to get parliaments involved in the EU's decision-making process. Hence, as the chairman of the European People's Party, Wilfried Martens, explains in the preface, the Lisbon Treaty and protocols on the role of national parliaments in the EU, along with application of subsidiarity and proportionality, are clearly at the heart of state machinery but have not been appropriately dealt with. An extreme example verging on caricature is given, pointing out that in Statement 51, 'Belgium notes that (…) both the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate of the Federal Parliament and parliamentary assemblies of the language communities and regions are (…) components of the national parliamentary system or chambers of the National Parliament.' Hence the reaction from flabbergasted legal experts, trying to understand what exactly is the role of the Belgian national parliament whose existence the government suddenly seems to have discovered. The authors therefore call for a structured dialogue between the EU and its members that takes account of the specific nature of how each country is structured and the need to include the European Parliament in all national parliamentary debates because talking among oneselves 'has its limits'.
(MT)
*** ROMAIN YAKEMTCHOUK: La Belgique et la France. Amitiés et rivalités. L'Harmattan (5-7 rue de l'Ecole Polytechnique, F-75005 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 40467920 - Fax: 43258203 - email: diffusion.harmattan@wanadoo.fr Internet: http://www.librairieharmattan.com ). 2010, 301 p., 29 €. ISBN 978-2-296-12284-0.
As Belgium experiences its severest existential crisis since the country was founded, and as Flemish nationalists are leading more and more French-speakers to consider whether it is inevitable that the country will be divided up, the scenario of Wallonia and even Brussels becoming part of neighbouring France is no longer the hobby horse of a handful of die-hards who want to link up with France. Hence the timeliness of this book, in which an emeritus professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, formerly editor-in-chief of the review Studia Diplomatica, recounts at length the history of relations between France and the area that only became the country of Belgium as recently as 1830. This history is characterised by a degree of sympathy and friendship, but also by the greed of French kings and other French rulers. The history is convoluted and complex because the Battle of the Golden Spurs (la bataille des Eperons d'or) of 11 July 1302 (a date that is now the annual day of the Flemish Community in Belgium) was won by the Count of Namur, no less, Gui de Dampierre, who only became the Count of Flanders because he inherited the area when his wife died, rather than Flanders going to French nobility allied to the burghers of Flemish cities like Ghent, Bruges and Ypres/Ieper. Nationalists clearly still take advantage of simplistic ideas cloaked in romanticism rather than reality. The author describes all the high points of relations between Belgium and France, from the two world wars to friction between the two countries over the European project. Romain Yakemtchouk ends by examining the future of Belgium because although Paris has not been keen on the idea of absorbing French-speaking Belgium to date, not politically at least, things are rather different when it comes to the economy.
(MT)
*** Traités consolidés - Charte des droits fondamentaux. European Union Official Publications Office (Luxembourg. Internet: http: //bookshop.europa.eu). 2010, 403 pp, €10 (excl. VAT). ISBN 978-928242579-4.
This extremely attractive, user-friendly and well laid-out publication contains the consolidated versions of the Treaties on European Union and the Functioning of the EU, along with related protocols and annexes, as approved in Lisbon and which came into force on 1 December 2009. The book includes the statements annexed to the final act at the final Intergovernmental Conference, along with the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights proclaimed in Strasbourg on 12 December 2007 by the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers and the Commission.
(MT)
*** Version consolidée du Traité Euratom. European Union Publications Office (see above). 2010, 112 pp, €7 (excl. VAT). ISBN 978-92-824-2556-5.
This is the consolidated version of the Treaty setting up the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), along with annexes and protocols, as amended under the Lisbon Treaty. The last time a consolidated version of this treaty was published was back in 1995.
(MT)
*** FABRIZIO CANTELLI, MARTA ROCA I ESCODA, JOAN STAVO-DEBAUGE, LUCA PATTARONI (Eds.): Sensibilités pragmatiques. Enquêter sur l'action publique. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (1 av. Maurice, B-1050 Brussels. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - email: pie@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Action Publique" series, No. 5. 2009, 444 pp, €42-50. ISBN 978-90-5201-571-2.
Following on from a conference organised at the 'Université Libre de Bruxelles,' young researchers take a dip in this book in a new look at state action, based on the pragmatic approach seen in the social science field. This 'school' is built on an intellectual regrouping characterised by shaking up the over directly 'macro' directions taken by systemism, neo-Marxism and the like, along with a criticism of what are called excessively 'strategist' or confined readings of the situation, the objective being to explore avenues of a brand-new meshing of the various spatial and temporal levels of social phenomena. In this perspective, the landscape of state policy analysis is evolving under the impact of an interlocking of political science, sociology and philosophy. The book reports on this regrouping process through a constellation of structured investigations in two main sections. In the first, looking and ethics and politics, the researchers look at topics such as petty theft from homeless people in Paris, the administrative work carried out by French state officials behind the counter at a French police station, 'evictions policy,' the political structuring of environmental ethics on a daily basis, an alternative approach to anti-doping strategy, 'moving in the direction of an urban risk strategy,' public action in the face of moral outrage and outplacement 45 years on. There is similar diversity in the second part of the book, examining institutions' range of outlook and actions. This section is more open to the European dimension with essays sketching out a pragmatic sociology of the expert CV applying to the European Union, genetics, a first step towards a programmatic approach to European public action and expert assessment in the governance of European lifelong learning.
(PBo)