*** WILLEM SCHINKEL: De nieuwe democratie. Naar andere vormen van politiek. De bezige bij (1 Van Miereveldstraat, Postbus 75184, NL-1070 AD Amsterdam. Tel: (31-20) 3059810 - fax: 3059824 Email: info@debezigebij.nl - Internet: http://www.debezigebij.nl ). 2012, 224 pp. €19.50. ISBN 978-90-234-7182-0.
This book is an invitation to invent a new democracy. It is a plea for a new kind of critical nationalism, which would integrate the European dimension. In the Netherlands this would help strengthen democracy in the country through the creation of a Council of State, on the model of the European Commission because this would also have the right of initiative and the power for setting the agenda. The book is also crammed with insightful commentaries on populism, the damaging de-politicisation process in Europe, multiculturalism, secularism as a form of exorcism, freedom and new automated technologies and the drift from a law based on a concern for fairness towards one based on concern for security … It is certainly a book that at least needs to be debated! The author is a young lecturer in theoretical sociology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. In his book, Willem Schinkel proves that he is thinker committed to providing new analyses and ideas. He thinks that it is essential that in democracy, people are allowed to reinvent the concept by thinking differently. In order for this to remain a healthy exercise, it requires perspectives that provide access to alternative routes. This is, however, exactly what is lacking today due to a gradual process of de-politicisation.
The author considers that this de-politicisation is the reduction of politics to issue management and technical resolution of specific subjects, whilst the struggle of ideologies or questions of solidarity and justice have no place in this equation at all. Nowadays, we consume our opinions through the television or Internet, particularly when opinion polls are presented and the uninformed citizen can learn something about such and such a subject. Just as financial speculators influence fluctuation on the markets through the positions they take, ideas about society also have a tendency to create and mould this society. Subsequently, complexity is replaced by simplicity, where one's own opinion is recognised in a presentation and we can in fact ignore the complex reality of conflicting interests. This “facility” for the citizen leaves fertile ground for both manipulators and the accountants and thus helps to further feed into disappointment about politics, which is perceived as being incapable of ever being able to resolve any of these problems. This is also ideal ground on which populists such as Geert Wilders can grow. In this connection the author points out that there is a fascination for the “Ready-Made”, an attitude developed by Marcel Duchamp, which consists in simply choosing an object that has already been manufactured and making it into a work of art and therefore untouchable, which bizarrely brings it into the orbit of Pop Art. For Wilders et al, this consists of a certain nostalgic and purified idea of a nation's glorious past, which should be untouchable. There are other common points of view that include an immoderate taste for repetition and a fetishism for a representation that relentlessly reiterates the same refrain and image…
The author's annotations are very influenced by Bordieu and extensive and diverse reading, generally of works produced on the left. It is a shame that in all this diversity there is none present when he tackles more daily situations that arise in the press. In this perspective, there is a sharp focus on the situation in the Netherlands and references drawn from the Dutch media, which obviously blunts the possibility of this work ever reaching an international or indeed a European readership, which it certainly deserves due to the original ideas that the author explores.
Lieven Taillie
*** JEAN-MICHEL DE WAELE, MATHIEU VIEIRA ( editors): Une droitisation de la classe ouvrière en Europe? Economica (49 rue Héricart, F-75015 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 45781292 - fax: 45750567 - Internet: http://www.economica.fr ). "Politiques comparées" series. 2012, 221 p. €29. ISBN 978-2-7178-6139-6.
This publication is an extension of a colloquy organised almost four years ago by the Institute of Political Studies in Lille and the Revue internationale de politique. It includes contributions from Belgian and French political scientists in a comparative perspective, who examine the drift to the right, indeed the far right, by a section of the working-class electorate. Who does the working class vote for today? In the different national situations, how does this drift of working-class votes to the right distinguish itself? How should the very notion of this right-wing shift be interpreted? How should cases where workers who vote for left-wing alliances that offer some sort of resistance be seen? These are some of the questions that these contributions attempt to answer. They are divided into two different parts. The first part fully focuses on comparative analyses, which, although they tend to agree on major trends relating to this phenomenon, explain the latter in quite different ways. Therefore, Professor Daniel-Louis Seiler puts things into perspective by pointing out that a section of the working class vote has always gone to Christian Democrat parties or parties of the right. On the other hand, Nonna Mayer confirms this right-wing shift by explaining that it does not involve an extreme right-wing shift but rather, “a recurring temptation to abstain”, which should also be taken into account. Pierre Bréchon does not identify a general right-wing shift in the values of the working class and confirms that the vote for the right and à fortiori for the far right, results more from one's qualifications than where one is located in the professional spectrum. Other authors analyse the spatial dimensions of this long-term right-wing shift in the working class, as well as the relationship between the left and the working class in Belgium and in France. The second part of the book focuses on case studies. It then describes the dislocation between the working-class electorate and the Socialist electorate in France. Two researchers, Fabien Escalona and Mathieu Vieira subsequently observe a shift in the Socialist electoral dynamic towards the big cities and the subsequent, “emergence of ideological poles of social democracy”. Their colleague, Florent Gougou, illustrates that in the same country, “the decline in the working class vote has gradually freed up space for right-wing parties, a space from which the Front National has particularly benefited”. In the Italian context, Paolo Belluci and Christophe Roux demonstrate that Forza Italia and the Northern League have often been able to inherit part of the working class vote that previously went to the Christian Democrats but that this is also something quite substantial. Professors Jean-Michel De Waele and Maïté Leroy examine the specific situation in Poland. They point out that the working class, “was the driving force in the struggle against the regime of really existing socialism” and that in a context of privatisation and ultra-liberalism, the majority of polish society votes for the right and the workers simply follow this trend.
(MT)
*** JEAN-CLAUDE PIRIS: The Future of Europe. Towards a Two-Speed EU? Cambridge University Press (The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK. Tel: (44-01223) 326050 - fax: 315052 - Internet: http://www.cambridge.org ). 2012, 166 pp, £17.99 / $32.99 (paper back) or £55 / $99 (hard back ). ISBN 978-1-107-66256-8 (paper back) or 978-1-107-02137-2 (hard back).
For a very long time, as director-general of the legal service at the Council of the Union's general secretariat, Jean-Claude Piris, participated as a legal adviser in all inter-governmental conferences that have changed the profile of the European Union since the conference that gave birth to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. It is therefore an institutional expert, who, in this high tempo opuscule, attempts to identify the ways of redemption for a European Union that is decidedly off-colour. According to the author, the Union is suffering from “three huge challenges”. Firstly, there is the Eurozone crisis “which already affects the stability” of the EU 27 club. Then there is the fact that public confidence in the Union is declining and it would be difficult to restore this through a Euro zone rescue programme, which can roughly be translated as, “a reduction in social welfare, an increase in budgetary savings and stricter economic discipline” and confirms that this is certainly not a way to win friends among the public. Finally, there is the observation that the European institutions are not operating effectively. Jean-Claude Piris subsequently identifies the different problems inherent in the Council of Ministers' decision-making process, “the progressive weakening of the Commission…the relative failure of the European Parliament”, which he puts down to problems such as, “distortions in the representation of the citizens” that prevail there (he thinks that it is abnormal that decisions can be taken there by the four biggest member states against the opinions of elected MEPs) and the fact that MEPs are, “more accountable to their political party than to their voters”, which means that European politics remains confined to a strictly national framework. On the basis of this decidedly gloomy background, he is convinced that European integration is the only possible option for European citizens and their countries and in this connection Jean-Claude Piris examines four possible options for the future. Firstly, he swiftly dismisses the possibility of the member states revising the treaties, which he considers as “politically unrealistic”. He then looks at the possibility of continuing along the path of the current treaties, which already provide opportunities for differentiation. Does the author really believe this is possible? There are two options for a two-speed Europe, one involves flexibility and does not require changes to the treaties or the formal setting up of a group on the sidelines of the Union, and the other takes effective steps to set up a group whose members would be legally obliged to further cooperate in a certain number of areas, to which the author focuses most of these reflections. For example, in the hypothesis of the last option mentioned, he considers that the Commission and the European Parliament would find it difficult to be active while working for an institutionalized hard-core, whilst it would be essential that the European Court of Justice maintained its authority over it. No matter how things pan out, this former legal adviser provides an interesting insight in this book into legal difficulties related to such an enterprise of revising the European project and how these difficulties could possibly be overcome.
(MT)
*** The Federalist Debate. Papers on Federalism in Europe and the World. Einstein Center for International Studies (26 via Schina, I-10144 Torino. Tel./fax: (+39-011) 4732843 - Email: federalist.debate@libero.it - Internet: http://www.federalist.debate.org ). 2012, No. 1, 64 pp. Annual subscription: €15.
Obviously, this edition of this well-known federalist publication focuses on the crisis in the Eurozone and, more broadly, the European Union itself. Barbara Spinelli goes as far as posing the question of, “what if Europe has to face its own mortality?” in her editorial. Lucio Levi begins by pointing out that the sovereign debt crisis is not just the concern of European countries but also that of the US and Japan, which are in fact in a worse position than the former in this context. Therefore “world debt conflict is underway” and developing countries cannot accept that the West maintains its domination by way of a debt that incessantly continues to grow. The editor therefore concludes that a new model for growth has to be found but that the foremost priority in Europe is to get its citizens to no longer see “the EU as a body that imposes sacrifices, promotes austerity, cuts social expenditure, and generates unemployment”. In this perspective, the schism that occurred between United Kingdom and its partners during the December European Council bodes well and that the United Kingdom's determination for the European Union to be nothing other than a market has been disavowed and that three steps have been made in the right direction: firstly, it was implicitly recognised that new steps towards integration could only be made within the framework of the Eurozone; there is also the principle according to which “the Treaty will enter into force as soon as a majority of twelve member states of the Eurozone has ratified it” and finally, there is a commitment by member states to incorporate the inter-governmental agreement in the Lisbon Treaty within the next five years. These different factors encourage Lucio Levi to consider that progress towards a federal Europe and therefore a two-speed Europe are within our grasp and that the priority is now one of creating “a Eurozone government accountable to the European Parliament”. Through the Lisbon Treaty, the latter now has “the responsibility to design a new institutional architecture for the Eurozone and to regulate the coexistence of the Eurozone within the larger Union”.
(MT)
*** Il Federalista. Rivista di politica. Edif (8 Villa Glori, I-27100 Pavia. Internet: http://www.ilfederalista.eu ). 2011, No. 3, 258 pp. Annual subscription: €25 (Europe), €30 (abroad).
Most of this issue, in the publication close to the Movimento Federalista Europeo, focuses on the Eurozone crisis and the federalist responses for solving it! The editorial therefore looks at the “challenges in 2012” and calls for us to look at four different aspects of the problem. Firstly, there is the “relationship that exists between the necessity of saving the euro and that of building political union”. This publication identifies the, “obvious lack of democratic legitimacy in the current European governance mechanism for tackling the crisis”. A rethink regarding the Community method for accomplishing political union in Europe is required, which is taken from extracts from Ferdinando Riccardi's A Look behind the News, which confirm the emergence of a two-speed Europe. Thirdly, the editorial considers that it is unthinkable that federal institutions, which he so very much wants, can be created, “in a much vaster framework than that of monetary union”. This also leads him to dismissing the French idea of providing the euro zone with a parliament, supported by national parliaments. Finally, with regard to the current objective of building, “a federation in the confederation” and the approach to adopt to achieve this end, is effectively that of, “officially creating a two-speed Europe with the participation of citizens in a new and constitutive phrase”. This publication considers that our political leaders can no longer hide behind the, “alibi of the United Kingdom's vetoes in the European Council, as they did last December, to justify missing the historic rendezvous with the European Federation.
(MT)