*** SILVIO GUINDANI, JENARO TALENS (Eds.: Carrefour Europe. Une approche interdisciplinaire dédiée à Philippe Braillard. Editions Academia-Bruylant (29 Grand Place, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve. Tel: (32-10) 452395 - Fax: 454480 - email: promotion@academia-bruylant.be - Internet: http://www.academia-bruylant.be ). 'Publications de l'Institut européen de l'Université de Genève' series, No. 7. 2010, 272 pp, €35 in Belgium and France, €37 elsewhere. ISBN 978-2-87209-965-8.
Europe as it has been built over nearly sixty years now is not the private property of lawyers, political scientists, economists or other historians. Standing proudly in the tradition of his forerunner, Denis de Rougemont, the broad-minded thinker who set up the University European Studies Institute in Geneva, Philippe Braillard spent a whole seven years when he was director of that institute, which by then had become the European Institute of Geneva University, even more intensively cultivating an inter-disciplinary approach to Europe. This book pays tribute to Philippe Braillard and contains essays by lecturers and alumni of the European Institute, providing dazzling eye-witness report with the traditional subject headings (politics, history, economy and so on) proceeded by a rich section on 'Culture and Identity'. In addition, Silvio Guindani, director of studies since 2000, sets out in the introduction the theme of inter-disciplinarity that runs throughout the wide variety of disparate-looking essays.
It goes without saying that a book of this nature cannot be summarized in a few words. May thee author of these lines therefore be allowed to nibble at a few of the essays in order to whet the appetite or at least to try to get across the great interest of this publication as a whole. In the 'Culture and Identity' section, one cannot overlook, for example, the unravelling of identity issues made by Antoine Maurice in his essay 'Raison et déraison des identités collectives en Europe'. The author is a journalist who used in lecture in the sociology of the media and who painstakingly list the collective identities that are expressed in modern Europe - the regrowth of nationalist identities in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, and also in Belgium and the north of Italy, via some of the autonomous regions of Spain, flourishing under the figleaf of a hypocritical search for regional identity that the author describes as nothing more than giving vent to 'regional nationalitarian spleen' - not to mention the populist political movements that abuse of the State and/or Europe in this fight against globalisation. And the author goes even further, also discerning 'non-territorial and transnational identities' from homosexuality to feminism via young people's identifying with certain musical trends and other fashions, not to mention identities forged in the virtual world of the internet. This leaves Europe rather jettisoned, after having been 'torn apart for most of the last century by identity exclusions (…) and now trying through the painstaking search for a voluntary, common and multicoloured identity to find a way out of the tragedy, a solution that is grand enough to match its fate.' Will Europe pull this off? In answer to this question, one should probably talk about the race that is now underway between the deadly impulses of the darkest past and the new countries joining, against all expectations and in the face of all opposition, the continuation of the utopian project launched by the 'founding fathers' of Europe. The outcome is not set in stone, but it would surely be premature to argue that the national princes that govern us might not have been bold enough to get citizens to appreciate the true value of the revolution started sixty years ago. In the same spirit, we should also mention another article from the same part of the book, an article by Jenaro Talens on how cinema has contributed to the building of a truly European cultural imagination, which brings him to assert that cinema even materialises the very idea of 'cultural exception' in that its representation modes make it possible to conceive of the European identity 'not as a homogenising (along the lines of the American melting pot), but rather as the intermeshing of heterogeneous cultures and traditions.'
The last article I have selected comes from the politics and institutions section and is a suggestion by René Schwork that the European Union should learn a little from the Swiss experience if it wants to get over its 'crisis of popular legitimacy' by learning from the Swiss direct democracy method of referenda on legislative matters. This well-known political scientist defends the point of view that over and above the degree of rationality of debates and the 'sometimes disconcerting' outcome of popular wisdom, at the end of the day, referendums are 'the form of decision-making that gives people the feeling of belonging.' This is hard to argue with, rather like the observation of Laurent Dutoit's that political parties at the European Parliament (not to mention in the Member States...) 'nationalise the debate rather than Europeanising it'. If making use of direct democracy did no more than managing to overcome the negation and/or obstruction of Europe by national political parties, then it would indeed be a blessing for the European Union and for European identity!
(MT)
*** JEAN-MICHEL GUIEU, CHRISTOPHE LE DRÉAU (Eds.): Le "Congrès de l'Europe" à La Haye (1948-2008). 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.colm ). "Euroclio" series, No. 49. 2009, 427 pp, €44.90. ISBN 978-90-5201-573-6.
On the sixtieth anniversary of the 'Congress of Europe' that was held in The Hague from 7 to 10 May 1948, more than thirty historians, including a batch of young researchers in the history of the European integration project who are members of the international Richie network, and political scientists met in Paris May 2008. Under the leadership of figures like professors Gérard Bossuat, Eric Bussière and Robert Franck, they revisited this famous episode in the European adventure to determine in as much detail as possible the role it played in the European debate of the post-war period and, more importantly, in the history of the notification of Europe. That is why the actual debate at The Hague, which is already well-known and amply commented upon, has been left to one side in most of the scientific essays in this fine book, the authors preferring to address the subject from other angles. They take a very deep look, for example, at the economic, parliamentarian and intellectual milieus present at The Hague and set the Congress of Europe of The Hague against the backdrop of the various efforts then underway to shape European unity, attempting to measure the extent to which the debates in the famous Ridderzaal hall had served as their sounding board. In the same spirit, they discern the immediate and long-term impact of the Congress in the history of the European project. Jean-Michel Guieu explains in the introduction that one of the key issues in this work was working out whether 'The Hague gave rise to (…) a dynamic encouraging the European project or whether it paradoxically (…) marked out the limits of a particular method for the European project.' This is a loaded question because several essays demonstrate in a highly delectable manner at times that The Hague was first and foremost the theatre of hidden and semi-hidden clashes between unionists gathered around the person of Churchill by the skill of Duncan Sandys and the federalists. The latter, like Alexandre Marc, Hendrik Brugmans, Denis de Rougemont, Altiero Spinelli and other members of an 'aristocracy of prophets,' as historian Balmand would describe them at a later date, were younger than most of the other Congress participants, and that meant that they were less influential and less devious than the unionists. The most formidable of the unionists were the British, and Nicolas Stenger describes how federalist Robert Aron has described their way of constantly monopolising the podium: 'There were so many different types of them and each continued where the previous had left off. Anglican archbishops in full ceremonial garb, trade union in plain clothing, lords, suffragettes, military men and Quakers... and they all kept on hammering home the same thing.' Jean-Michel Guieu also quotes the eye-witness report by the ever-alert Jean-Pierre Gouzy, describing how Duncan Sandys made sure that the British representatives were 'cleverly housed together in two big buildings' while the French were 'scattered about (…) here and there in small groups over a 10 kilometre radius, sometimes lodging in bed and breakfasts.' Hardly surprising, then, that the less ambitious vision won the day at the Hague, although it did lead to tangible outcomes like the Council of Europe, the European Culture Centre and the College of Europe in Bruges. Prof. Robert Franck concludes that it was 'clearly not The Hague, or the idealist spirit of a 48-er at The Hague, that gave laid the foundation stone for the European project,' but rather the statement by Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950: 'The Schuman Plan was a defeat for the British; it was taking revenge on Great Britain. The British, who had been centre-stage in The Hague were now sidelined. The Monnet Method is Britain out, and therefore marked a break with The Hague.' Really? Probably, but one should not forget that another quality of the British is their tenacity…
(MT)
*** VERONIKA HEIDE: De l'esprit de la Résistance jusqu'à l'idée de l'Europe. Projets européens et américains pour l'Europe de l'après-guerre (1940-1950). Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (see below). "Euroclio" series, No. 52. 2010, 470 pp, €42-50. ISBN 978-90-5201-579-8.
The author is a historian who qualified at the 'Université Paris IV-Sorbonne' and now lectures at the University of Munich. In this remarkable thesis, Veronika Heide looks back to the 'guerrilla' beginnings of the most recent European renaissance, the one so painfully arising in the Resistance in Europe and encouraged by the circles of power in the United States. Above all, the Resistance amounted to rejection of the European order pursued by Hitler. On 29 November 1942, Thomas Mann said as much on the Deutsche Hörer programme broadcast by the a BBC when he commented: "Of all of Hitler's lies, the most insolent is the European lie. (…) Know, dear listeners, that the whole world that still believes in freedom and human dignity is suffering with you and will no longer tolerate this terrifying new European order and will not allow it to continue. (…) The true Europe will be created by you yourselves with the aid of the free powers"… This quotation alone makes the angles of research selected by the author for her research particularly pertinent, namely: How did European ideas in the non-Communist Resistance influence the European project later on? What was the role of the United States in this connection, both during and after the war? How were the two connected? These complex issues have never before been studied so systematically, explains Prof. Georges-Henri Soutou, and the author provides scientific answers that are as nuanced as they are enlightening. Veronika Heide stresses the key role of the Italian Resistance and the work of Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi that led to the 1944 "Manifesto of the Italian Resistance," paving the way for the rising power of the search for federalism, as defined by the two men at Ventotene. The author also explains, however, how the Italian federalists' ideas have survived and still have their defenders today, whereas other resistance movements - not to mention US institutions - have not managed to follow their lead for very long.
(Michel Theys)
*** Fedechoses… pour le fédéralisme. Presse fédéraliste (Maison de l'Europe, 18 av. Félix Faure, F-69007 Lyons. Internet: http://www.pressefederaliste.eu ). 2010, No. 148, 32 pp, €3. Annual subscription: €15.
This federalist publication is as corrosive as it is pugnacious, and this issue has a go at the French government's attacks on the Roma and against French people of foreign origin. The editorialist argues that the attacks "demonstrate the extent to which the ideology of the national State, in which diabolising of foreigners as internal enemies is key, is still a powerful driving when politics is unable to solve society's problems". In order to achieve this, the review calls on readers to take inspiration from the setting up of the 'Crocodile Club' by Altiero Spinelli thirty years ago, hoping that the 'Spinelli Group' that was created at the European Parliament on 15 September 2010 will achieve this. Pier Virgilio Dastoli was for many a long year the faithful assistant of Spinelli, and he points out that the elected European Parliament was, in Spinelli's view, "the only political arena in Europe where constituent action could have developped with a democratic method and where high-level compromise could have been worked out among the big European political parties," which is why he calls on the Spinelli Group to work to ensure a third Convention is convened, as the only way of "laying the foundations for true European economic government/governance". The author of another essay, a member of the Istituto Affari Internazionali founded by Spinelli, concludes: "the neo-Spinellians allow us the hope that a season of new deepening of the European integration project can emerge".
(MT)
*** ALAIN ROBA, JOHNNY BEKAERT, MICHEL MICHIELS (Eds.): Princess Europe. L'Enlèvement d'Europe - De Ontvoering van Europa - The Rape of Europe - Die Entführung der Europa. Alain Roba (78 rue Langeveld, B-1180 Brussels. email: alainroba@skynet.be) and La Maison de l'Image (19 av. des Volontaires, B-1160 Brussels. Internet: http://www.seedfactory ). 2010, 219 pp.
This superb publication is the catalogue for an exhibition currently showing at the Hôtel de Ville in Brussels until 7 November 2010. In the treasures he has assembled (engravings, etchings, old books, plastic art, fine porcelain, ancient and modern coins, philately, medals and more) over nearly thirty-five years relating to the theme of the abduction of Europe by Zeus disguised as a bull, collector Alain Roba shows that no matter what their differences are, Europeans are heirs to the same European culture which is a complex alliance of diversity and unity and originates in a founding myth. This extremely richly illustrated catalogue also contains cartoons and illustrations from the press, relating to European events over the past two decades, the oldest of them dating back to the start of the modern epoch.
(MT)