*** DANIEL COHN-BENDIT, GUY VERHOFSTADT: Debout l'Europe ! Manifeste pour une révolution postnationale en Europe. 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, 157 pp. €11.90. ISBN 978-2-87495-197-8.
This small book is an expression of anger, passionate call to arms and a declaration of love. Two voices can be heard both of which are incredibly important. There is the voice of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who remains in his role of intellectual agitator with his trademark anti-authoritarian verve. There is also something a little less expected in this brief anthology, that of long-term Belgian Prime Minister and whose fervent liberalism earned him the nickname of “Baby Thatcher” in the past. Nonetheless, at the European Parliament, he has found a great battleground in which to fight his cause or at least… on a polemical level. It goes without saying that this sometimes powerful book, with an edgy, spirited and sometimes incantatory style will provoke a lot of sad misunderstanding and downright anger in many chancelleries, ministerial suites and permanent representations. Danny the Red, we should have known! But what should we have expected from an ancient and very select club of the European Council, where it is well known that politically responsible, serious individuals, eager to protect the interests of Union member countries are based? Moreover didn't Verhofstadt join with his former 1968 radical to call for a post-national revolution in order to build a federal Europe? Ultimately, it is always those closest to us who betray us in some kind of way …
The ideas put forward by these two men becomes a powerful torrent in which they express their convictions with passion and without seeking to structure their demands or appeals in any academic manner. This lively book comes straight from the heart and, especially, these passionate outbursts are based on the principle laid down in the first chapter, “offence is the best defence”. Subsequently, they launch a relentless attack and denounce, “a continent trapped in national inertia, without ambition and lacking hope”. They do not pull their punches either when they accuse member states of being totally to blame for this debacle. Their contempt for inter-governmental drift is ferocious and they say that under Merkozy, we have seen the emergence of an unproductive “directorate”. They qualify this by the fact that Germany and France were the first countries to have undone the screws of the Stability and Growth Pact and it is therefore totally stupid to think that these “offenders” are really in a credible position to teach the lazy Greeks and Portuguese a lesson on good housekeeping. This is why the only solution that could really save the Eurozone and subsequently the European Union as a whole would, according to our two political godfathers, be to move as quickly as possible to the construction of a European federal state, with the Commission becoming a “genuinely European government”, together with a parliament bolstered by additional powers, “including the right of initiative”. It is high time that the European Council became an historical afterthought and which is nothing other than, “a syndicate of national interests…given that those that make it up and have a seat there defend selfish national interests against the European interest and that of the citizens and peoples of Europe”.
It is obvious that this charge sheet is a serious one and we cannot take it as read that the message will be very much appreciated (it is certain that it won't go down well in a lot of European capitals) especially by European leaders. Nonetheless, will the appeal launched to citizens be any more appreciated? This is in fact where the weakness of the argument developed by Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt lies. To listen to both of them, it would appear that it is now up to citizens to step into the breach by electing convinced “European federalists” to persuade the guardians of the national temples to see reason. This is all well and good but where are we going to find these future federalist MEPs? They can currently be found at the European Parliament in the four major traditional parties. They can also undoubtedly be found in a lot of the other national political parties but not in all of them. They are, however, in a minority in their own parties (this is also the case in the newspapers, as illustrated by Jean Quatremer, our gifted colleague at Libération who carried out the interview on which a lot of this book was based …) and have difficulty in getting their voices heard and sharing their European credo. The national parties were the first to come out to defend their national executives in the defence of their own national backyards and the so-called “European” elections sadly illustrated this. The missing link from Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt's thesis is, perhaps, the subsequent necessity of providing the Union with truly European, transnational parties that are fearless in fighting to defend the European interest, including that, of course, of European citizens. This is certainly something that had simply been forgotten and the majesty and vigour of the struggle defended in this book by these two men is more than timely in this era of increasing populism. They provide us with a timely reminder that, “democracy is also about leading and not blindly following public opinion for electoralist and opportunist reasons”. Hats off to both of them!
Michel Theys
*** NICOLAS LEVRAT: La construction européenne est-elle démocratique ? La Documentation Française (29 quai Voltaire, F-75344 Paris Cedex 07. Tel: (33-1) 40157010 - Internet: http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr ). « Réflexe Europe / Débats » series. 2012, 169 pp. €9. ISBN 978-2-11 -008895-6.
Nicolas Levrat is a senior lecturer in international and European law and head of the European Studies Institute at the University of Geneva. The noble objective he sets out in this book is to identify the origins of the democratic deficit affecting the European Union. This malaise has over time, helped by the crisis, been transformed into an increasingly deeper disease. He also seeks to interpret the supposed remedies proposed over a number of years by European leaders to cure this illness but which have been unsuccessful. Although this is a useful attempt, the book is off target. In the first part of the book, he presents and gauges the different efforts made to provide a Union with procedures and institutions that are more democratic and subsequently measures their effective scope. He then examines the constitutive elements contained within the democratic deficit before finally analysing the arguments against the “Euro-democratico- sceptics”, namely, that the European Union will never be a democracy in the way we have experienced it at a national level. He then looks at the alternative modes of endorsement that have been proposed but which have failed to convince, such as the current areas in which efforts are being made to build greater democracy in the Union. Although Nicolas Levrat does not succeed in convincing the reader fully, this is because the subject appears to be a little uncomfortable for him. Therefore, in the introduction he asks whether it is absolutely necessary to apply, “democratic demands similar to those in western nation states” to the Union because the UN, for example, does not have any more democratic modalities itself. He also admits that it is possible that a post-national democracy could exist but he never mentions the possibility of a fully functioning federal Europe …
(MT)
*** GENEVIÈVE DUCHENNE, MICHEL DUMOULIN (Editors): Générations de fédéralistes européens depuis le XIXe siècle. Individus, groupes, espaces et réseaux. 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 ). "Euroclio" series, No. 67. 2012, 215 p. ISBN 978-90-5201-862-1.
This book provides us with the progress achieved by two workshops that brought together historians from the Catholic University of Leuven to attempt to verify how generations of “historico-social” European militants appeared over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In concrete terms, the authors explore the different reasons that motivated German, Austrian, Belgian, French, Dutch, Luxembourgish and Hungarian federalists to defend “sometimes body and soul” their ideals, which as indicated by Professor Duchenne and Professor Dumoulin in the introduction, included the goal of European unification. The studies also demonstrate that there was a disparity between moments when the elites of a country opted for a more pro-European solution. The book's editors illustrate that European perceptions are very much in flux and depend very much on a given moment and place. Similarly, it appears that there were no key moments that forged a militant commitment in this connection but rather, periods that were much more diffuse: the idea of a united Europe flourished in France between 1923-1927, in the Netherlands between 1929-1933 and in Belgium between 1926-1936. There are no other key areas to speak of that embody unequivocally the idea of a united Europe or even a significant event that is likely to signify the birth of this idea, which validates the following journalistic observation, “…the European Union as it is, contains very few places that materially embody the epic of its origins, or where, through its history and memory, a segment that has become symbolic of our collective identity of citizens of united Europe”. Is the current malaise being experienced by European citizens also the consequence of a lack of knowledge of the battles fought for Europe in the past by the few militants that have been forgotten all too soon?
(MT)