*** JACQUES LERUEZ: Thatcher. La Dame de fer. André Versaille éditeur (Centre Dansaert, 7 rue d'Alost, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 2133705 - Email: information@andreversailleediteur.com - Internet: http://www.andreversailleediteur.com ). 2012, 243 pp, €19-90. ISBN 978-2-87495-172-5.
Eleven years, six months and twenty-four days - the political 'eternity' during which Margaret Thatcher was prime minister at Number 10 Downing Street. On 28 November 1990, the Iron Lady officially handed in her resignation to Queen Elisabeth and was succeeded by John Major, who was as grey as she had been colourful. A page in British - and European - history was turning, but didn't quite lie flat, as Jacques Leruez demonstrates in the brand new introduction to this book that was first published twenty years ago, looking back at Mrs Thatcher's rise to power and drawing up a balance sheet of the radical reforms carried out under her leadership, whether in terms of politics, economics or social affairs. The third section of the book sees the author, an emeritus researcher at CNRS in France and former lecturer at the 'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris' (Sciences-Po), set out the very chaotic 'European' career of the woman who demanded 'her money back,' but would go on to lose power not as a result of action by Europe but, all the same, because of Europe.
It is clear that Maggie Thatcher was an unusual British prime minister, giving rise to a political neologism, 'Thatcherism.' During her first election campaign as boss of the Conservative Party, she said in 1979 that she was a 'politician of conviction,' a fighter who hated compromise (which she saw as amounting to defeat). It was her headmistressly style that her ministers ended up hating, after it had exasperated many of her interlocutors around the world, laconically and diplomatically explains the author, pointing out that more than twenty years after the fall of its icon, Thatcherism still colours politics in Britain and is a determining factor in the attitudes of leaders and other players at Westminster. For both Conservative and Labour governments, Thatcherist management of the economy has only been tinkered with, as successors tried to do no more than apply a little ointment to Thatcherism's most weeping wounds, poverty and job insecurity. Jacques Leruez even goes so far as to contend that Blairism was born of Thatcherism: 'without Thatcher and Labour's defeats in the polls, the modernisation of New Labour would never have gone so far,' he explains, adding the Commissioner Mandelson's quote: 'We are all Thatcherists.' Thatcherism gradually turned the Conservative Party into an essentially English party, with a degree of English nationalism. After waging a war on wets and Europhiles, the Conservative Party is now dominated by people who think, like many ordinary members, that Great Britain is sinking in the European Union and David Cameron was wrong, when he was still in opposition, to give up on the idea of holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and who snigger publicly about the current travails of the eurozone, explains the author.
In Europe, the Conservative Party has become far more Thatcherist over time than it was at the time of Thatcher herself. Through events like London's demands for a rebate, the refusal of the Thatcher governments to play the EU game of preferring EU contractors to the United States (referring here to the way that without any direct influence from Number Ten, British Airways chose Boeing and McDonnell to Airbus, and the Westland helicopter scandal), and the 'violent attack on the Belgian Empire' during the famous Bruges speech of 20 September 1988, Jacques Leruez demonstrates that the Iron Lady was both obstinate and convinced that what pro-Europeans term 'pooling' of sovereignty is, at the end of the day, nothing other than giving up sovereignty. He caustically comments that the term 'Grantham's Gaullism' (a condescending expression because it suggested that the grocer's daughter's nationalism was not much more than a shop-keeper's Gaullism, was quite accurate as it happens, as long as the comparison was restricted to the European dimension. Mrs Thatcher carried on fighting against Europe until the very end, voting against ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which led to her fall after resistance from the House of Lords in July 1993. In February 2007, at the unveiling of a statue of herself at the House of Commons, she joked that she would have preferred an iron statue, but bronze was good because it would not rust. Unfortunately, the Conservatives' allergy to European integration hasn't rusted either. …
Michel Theys
*** Le Revue générale. Revue générale asbl (41 ch. de Louvain, B-1320 Hamme-Mille. Tel: (32-10) 866629 - Fax: 866691 - Email: la.revue.generale@live.be - Internet: http://www.revuegenerale.be ). February 2012, No. 02/2012, 96 pp, €13. Annual subscription: €99 (Belgium), €109 (EU), €119 (outside the EU).
This issue of a Belgian review founded as long ago as 1865 is strongly influenced by Europe - and poetry. Philosopher by training and a former reporter, Renaud Denuit has written a three-voice poem, 'Ventotene: le grand espoir,' in which he evokes with respect and love the personality of Altiero Spinelli and the penning of the Manifesto for a Federal Europe, written with Ernesto Rossi in 1941, which is called the Ventotene Manifesto after the little Italian island on which he was imprisoned for anti-fascist activity along with other anti-Mussolini resistance fighters. This fine, delicate poetic dialogue between the island, Spinelli and another (clearly an official at the European Commission, Renaud Denuit, until he retired a few days ago) is described by the review's editors as being particularly of the moment because last autumn, the seventieth anniversary of the Ventotene Manifesto was celebrated and also, due in part to the financial and monetary crisis, the ideas of Spinelli are finding new life in political and academic circles alike. This idea is effectively corroborated in the editorial by French senator Francis Delpérée on the way Europe now has power to intervene in EU Member States' budgets, more accurately those of the eurozone, in other words core national prerogatives. He explains that in reality, the EU has not even asked whether it has the power to intervene, explains the respected Belgian constitutionalist, pointing out that any federal-type solution is based on power-sharing rather than direct interference by one partner in the other's decision-making. Hence the call by Francis Delpérée for the new type of governance in the eurozone to be set out in detail and no longer be seized by governments, by Merkozy or intergovernmental apparatchiks. Pointing out that economic governance is not the same thing as economic democracy, the editorialist slams a kind of collusion between the European Commission and national civil services, behind the backs of parliaments and parliamentarians. Alarm bells that all MPs and MEPs should pay heed to if they do not want to find themselves one day subject to a political Ventotene house arrest.
(MT)
*** The Federalist Debate. Papers on Federalism in Europe and the World. Einstein Center for International Studies (26 via Schina, I-10144 Turin. Tel./Fax: (+39-011) 4732843 - Email: federalist.debate@libero.it - Internet: http://www.federalist.debate.org ). 2011, No. 3, 64 pp. Annual subscription: €15.
This issue of the federalist publication headed by Lucio Levi - whose editorial is on the potential recognition of the state of Palestine by the United Nations - includes thoughts by the 1998 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Amartya Sen, ringing alarms bells amidst the economic and financial crisis: 'It is particularly distressing that the danger to democratic governance in Europe today, coming through the back door of financial priority, is not receiving anything like the concern that it should generate.' He is very critical of the way governments are handing power over to the credit rating agencies. Pointing out that he opposed the creation of the single currency because it should not have been set up before the creation of sufficient political and economy union, the Indian economist says: 'The wonderful political idea of a united democratic Europe has been transformed over the years to make democratic politics seem subsidiary to complete fidelity to a programme of incoherent financial amalgamation,' which he urges Europe to rebel against. In this connection, Soeren Keil, senior lecturer in international relations at Canterbury Christ Church University adds that the present crisis should get people 'to rethink the roots of Europe's unification' and understand that the only solution is to create a European Federation. Other issues covered in this issue include multilingualism, the emergency of a EuroMed Community and the Arab Spring from the federalist viewpoint.
(MT)
*** Fedechoses… pour le fédéralisme. Presse fédéraliste (Maison de l'Europe et des Européens, 13 rue de l'Arbre sec, F-69001 Lyons. Internet: http://www.pressefederaliste.eu ). 2011, No. 153, 36 pp, €8. Annual subscription: €30.
In this issue of a federalist newsletter that has lost none of its salt, veteran European activist Jean-Pierre Gouzy criticises the intergovernmental excesses hoisted upon the European Union at the moment, which threaten the future of the European project itself, he explains, because as experience shows time and time again, intergovernmentalism leads to repeated paralysis and prevents things from operating effectively. Accusing Germany and France of playing to the gallery with the 'golden rule' rather than taking on board eurobonds which would lead to genuine consolidation and solidarity in the eurozone, he quotes analysis by Georges Vedel, one of the great lawyers who drew up the Treaty of Rome: 'Supranational sovereignty is no less democratic than national sovereignty. Quite the opposite, it is more democratic if it is better able to meet fundamental needs and put into the hands of governments the workings of an international society that has until now been left to the anarchy of competing powers.' This little reminder will not be music to everyone's ears, although Jean-Pierre Gouzy is at pains to ward off the evil eye by writing that the current existentialist crisis at least gives new value to the fight for federalism.
(MT)
*** The European Council in 2011. General Secretariat of the Council of the European Communities (175 rue de la Loi, B-1048 Brussels. Tel: (+32-2) 2816111 - Internet: http://www.european-council.europa.eu ) and EU Publications Office (Luxembourg). 2012, 79 pp, ISBN 978-92-824-344-4.
Available in English, French and Dutch, the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, explains in this guide what the European Council achieved last year, the second year of Van Rompuy's term of what because a new EU institution under the Lisbon Treaty. Much of the document covers eurozone stability and the economies of the EU Member States. In this connection, Van Rompuy (a former Belgian prime minister) points out that many people have learnt that the markets move faster than democracy, particularly within the European Union where different countries differing opinions and interests always have to be reconciled in order to reach decisions everyone can go along with and therefore it is simply not credible to demand that the EU speed up its decision-making because particularly in the EU, time is politicians' cement and is used to build the shared house.
(MT)
*** CHRISTIAN WÖHST: Das Konzept der Neutralität im politischen Liberalismus. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, Postfach 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 2011, 153 pp, €26. ISBN 978-3-631-60808-1.
Western societies are often built on the common foundation of a liberal constitution and the values contained within it, along with affirmation of personal freedom and responsibility in pride of place. For example, fundamental freedoms are usually quoted as defining liberal from non-liberal societies, particularly freedom of speech. In this book, Christian Wöhst talks about the origin of liberal societies before going on to elaborate upon a more unusual topic, neutrality in political liberalism. The neutralist of the state vis-à-vis individuals is at the heart of European law and closely connected with the notion of equality in politics. And the notion of equality is itself often used in political philosophy to justify the very existence of state machinery. The debate about the neutrality of the state is alive and kicking and is therefore a complex, multi-layered theme giving rise to both political and ethical values. The author describes the debate among theoreticians and then highlights the potential and inherent dangers of neutrality in political liberalism. Taking a highly practical stance, the first chapter introduces the subject of neutrality and its typology, which are then developped throughout the book. He then looks at major protagonists in the debate about political neutrality and the various ways they address the subject. He outlines three main approaches - the constructed neutrality of John Rawls, the moral neutrality of Charles Larmore and the pragmatic neutrality of Bruce Ackerman. The third chapter moves away from theoretical arguments to consider the plurality of elements facing political neutrality, such as society, truth, language, law, recognition and virtue, all of which make it difficult for a single form of neutrality to exist. After these two thick chapters comparing theory with practice, Christian Wöhst discusses the potential of liberal neutrality and the benefits of its conceptualisation, summing up with enlightened conclusions. (JD)