*** YIANNOS CHARALAMBIDES: The Big Bet. Will Turkish Accession to the EU Threaten European Cohesion? Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, Postfach 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 'Koinon: Sozialwissenschaftliche interdisziplinäre Studien' series, No. 8. 2010, 269 pp, €39-10. ISBN 978-3-631-59055-3.
The question of whether Turkey will end up joining the European Union usually (and unfortunately) generates strong feelings and heated argument in which the facts of the case are too often obscured by emotion. Not in this book, however, in which a lawyer who is also a political scientist makes a detached overview of the positive and negative impact of Turkey joining the European Union from the viewpoint of Turkey itself, Turks and Europeans. A strictly scientific approach is used, based on various theories of international relations (realism, structural realism, functionalism and neo-functionalism), the author having the honesty to admit his preference for realism and for the theoretical approach of Robert Gilpin, whereby 'changes occurring in the international system bring about the rise or decline of the international system and may even lead to conflict and war.'
The resolutely scientific approach taken by Yiannos Charalambides does not prevent the journalist within him (he has worked as a political advisor to several MEPs) from making use of his gift of the gab. In the introduction, he asks a question, for example, that did the rounds 'just after the collapse of the Soviet bloc,' namely 'Will we have a European Germany or a German Europe?' He explains that 'the question about Turkish membership is whether we will have a European Turkey or a Turkish Europe.' His detailed answer to the question covers the great difference between the EU's Cohesion Policy and joining the EU club, the first being a policy to serve the needs of the EU that goes well beyond social and economic criteria to embrace common interests, conflicting Anatolian interests, power-sharing and power re-distribution, threats to existing balances of power, culture, military power and institutional governance. The author clearly tries to discern what role Turkey would have in the European project's economy in order to see whether or not it would be a danger to the other Member States and to the EU as a whole, and whether or not EU membership would be a danger to Turkey itself
After an investigation in which he explains various little-known aspects of the long road towards Europe undertaken by Turkey under the aegis of Kemal Atatürk and the way Europeans - particularly MEPs - have reacted to Turkey's accession application in recent years, Yiannos Charalambides draws rather negative, clinical conclusions. He believes that several factors could spoil the prospect of Turkey joining the EU. Firstly, there is the state of democracy in the country, with serious gaps when it comes to religious minorities, for example, along with women's rights, children's rights and freedom of speech. Then there is the 'statism' on the economic front inherited from Atatürk, which the army still exploits to line its own nest. Another negative factor is the army's military power, the second biggest in the Western world after the United States, which would overshadow the armies of the countries that are currently the EU's biggest countries. This overshadowing would also emerge more generally because of the size of the Turkish population (the only current Member State that would remain in its current position being Germany) and this would shatter the current balance of forces in the EU institutions. Yiannos Charalambides therefore says that cohesion in the EU would be affected by Turkey joining the club because 'it is obvious that the variable of 'national interest' affects the political scene and developments,' the views of the Chancellor of Germany and the French President being a clear manifestation of this. The author also looks at the United States' clear support for Turkey's application to join the EU, saying that it generates the fear that Turkey might be a 'fifth Phalanx' (a fifth column) for the United States within the EU. Is this really so uprising? As the author himself points out, the EU already has members (like the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic) which, 'each, in various cases, supported American rather than EU interests' in the past. It would therefore surely be a bad idea to put reject Turkey on the grounds that some countries suspect it of wanting to behave in the same way that some Member States already behave? Surely this would amount to a shocking manifestation of double standards? Michel Theys
*** The Federalist. A political review. Editrice Edif (8 via Villa Glori, I-27100 Pavia. Internet: http://www.thefederaist.eu ). 2010, 91 pp. Annual subscription: €35 (€50 outside Europe).
This issue of a federalist review founded by Mario Albertini and members of the European Federalist Movement in 1959 opens with two editorials that set the tone for the review. The first looks at the democratic revoltions in the Arab world, arising at the opening of a 'post-American era' and kicking off 'an epochal change in international balances.' What part of the world is in the best position to replace the 'pax Americana' in the Arab world? Europe, of course, except that its only convincing action to date on the southern side of the Mediterranean took the form of the Lomé Agreements, all the other interventions by the Member States being characterised by 'the pursuit of their own small national ambitions.' Nature abhors a vacuum and the review urges the EU to create a genuine European vision and finally make the move to a European Federal State, the only way it can properly help democracy to spread and take root on the other side of mare nostrum. The review makes the same points in the second editorial, but this time by learning the lessons of the various crises under way in the EU - the economic, financial and budget crises. The magazine points out that in this maelstrom, 'the absence of adequate European institutions has actually triggered a gradual weakening of cohesion within Europe,' with Member States thus far having 'shied away from investing their own resources in projects and programmes whose positive effect might strengthen economically, commercially and industrially, the other' Member States. The sovereign debt crisis cannot fail to raise the EU27's awareness of the suicidal nature of such an attitude because 'Europe's collapse would cost them all too dearly.' Therefore the European Union 'must break away from the past' and stop only playing the game of budget tightening, rising above what are now sterile arguments about the Community Method versus inter-governmentalism (even if this is unpleasant for Herman Van Rompuy, the review points out), in order to create political unity based on the shifting of sovereignty to the European level and states recognising that they are no longer 'the sole source of democratic legitimacy. (MT)
*** ALLAN ROSAS, LORNA ARMATI: EU Constitutional Law. An Introduction. Hart Publishing Ltd. (16c Worcester Place, Oxford, OX1 2JW, UK. Tel: (44-1865) 517530 - Fax: 510710 - email: mail@hartpub.co.uk - Internet: http://www.hartpub.co.uk ). 2010, 260 pp, £16-95. ISBN 978-1-84113-917-3.
Former deputy director general at the European Commission's legal department before becoming a judge at the European Court of Justice, Finnish national Allan Rosas and a lawyer who used to be his deputy at the Court of Justice but has now started working at the European Commission's legal department brilliantly demonstrate that some individuals are able to combine the clinical nature of law with Europhile convictions, all backed up by unbeatable arguments. The authors aim to demonstrate that the lack of a European Constitution following the French and Dutch No votes is only a trompe l'œil of history because the integration process that kicked off at the time of the Schuman Declaration sixty years ago, on 9 May 1951, has already gone so far that it is both useful and appropriate to talk today about a European Union constitutional order and constitutional law. Throughout the book, they therefore shed light on what distinguishes the European Union from traditional international organisations, placing it somewhere between a traditional organisation and a proper federal state. They spend time examining in this connection the hierarchy of law, the primacy and direct effect of EU law (which they see as confirming that the European Union is truly a legal and constitutional order in its own right), the decentralised nature of the integration system, the notions of 'differentiation' and 'variable geometry,' the so-called democratic deficit, the rôle of citizens in the EU, moving beyond strictly economic aims with the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, and common security. All potentially dry subject matter, but which in the hands of Allan Rosas and Lorna Armati become issues that are perfectly understandable to mere mortals. Summing up, the authors urge Member States never to forget that the prime aim of the European integration launched by Monnet and Schuman was to banish forever the horrors of war from the European continent, and the fact that they accomplished this mission so well that Europe is now active on various fronts - economics, public services, social cohesion and the environment - where it is finding it difficult to assert itself more than at present, particularity vis-a-vis citizens. They also point out that the domains in which the EU makes less of a dash - economic policy and the Common Foreign and Security Policy - are of course domains where the nation states wanted to remain masters of their own destiny The authors explain that until greater supranationality has been introduced in these domains, it seems pointless to hope that a pooling will take place of the political necessary to subordinate the national interest to European interest. Lawyers' careful reasoning can sometimes mesh with the more suspect arguments of federal activists… (MT)
*** The Federalist Debate. Papers on Federalism in Europe and the World. The Federalist Debate (26 via Schina, I-10144 Turin. Tel/Fax: (39-11) 4732843 - email: federalist.debate@libero.it - Internet: http://www.federalist-debate.org ). 2011, No. 1, 64 pp. Annual subscription: €15.
This issue of another well-known federalist review focusses, as required by current events, on the same issues as the previous publications. In the editorial, Lucio Levi says that the pax americana is coming to an end, as is clearly shown by the downgrading of the dollar as the international reserve currency He adds: 'the cycle of American mono-polarism, begun after the collapse of the Communist bloc, was not the latest but the final attempt by any single state by achieve world hegemony' and the door is now open to the arrival of a multi-polar world in which power politics should give way to the rule of law. He says that the European Union should play a key rôle in this re-jigging of the world because it started moving in this direction sixty years ago. Together with a tribute to the late Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the magazine addresses topics like how the eurozone meshes with the International Monetary Fund, a new growth model that could emerge from the creation of a federal Europe, the danger of long economic decline, immigration, social inclusion policies against the backdrop of globalisation and more besides. (MT)
*** Fedechoses… pour le fédéralisme, depuis 1973. Presse fédéraliste - Maison de l'Europe (18 av. Félix Faure, F-69007 Lyon. Internet: http://www.pressefederaliste.eu ). March 2011, No. 151, 36 pp, €8. Annual subscription: €30.
In this packed issue, Fedechoses explains in the editorial why it follows the values of the 'federalism of the Resistance' that emerged during the fight against the Nazis and the Fascists at the time of Europe being divided into sovereign states - comments that have a bitter undertone these days as some countries try to reintroduce borders that have been removed. There are articles in this issue on Albert Camus and Europe, the world and federalism, and the burning issues of the day are also covered. There are several articles on the Arab democratic revolutions with Schams el-Choneimi, for example, a Franco-Egyptian working for the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Human Rights, urging the European Union to find a different way of supporting these historic changes from relying on backhanders, in other words to negotiate with partner countries a new immigration and trade policy, the only way to really support and share democracy. Other articles report on the euro crisis and national debt, starting with a piece by Jean-Pierre Gouzy, who responds to the demand by French socialist François Hollande that the eurozone be converted into a 'Political Union,' that one needs to define a Political Union in detail because saying that it could only be a 'Federal Union with a European government' would be capable of putting an end to the ambiguities and evasions that have long been abused by people taking advantage of national sovereignty (Spinelli dixit) to emasculate the European project at every turn. He is backed in his arguments by Robert Toulemon, who points out that responsibility for the crisis is shared by states running up debts willy-nilly and negligent European authorities - the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Central Bank. Toulemon, a former director at the European Commission, says that for this reason, it would be a good idea to grant debt-ridden countries a lower interest rate and longer to ensure recovery, not to mention the fact that transferring some of the debt to the EU level would lead to a fall in the value of the euro, which in turn would boost growth and be an appropriate way of responding to the monetary dumping carried out by China and the United States. Faced with the threat of the euro collapsing, he says that even Germany might end up agreeing to things it will not contemplate at the moment. The review includes a brief article by Paolo Ponzano, setting out the arguments in favour of the 'Community Method,' and explaining that relying solely on intergovernmental cooperation will lead to collapse when the first clash of interests arises due to the absence of an independent political body looking after the common interest. (MT)