*** BRAM DELVAUX: EU Law and the Development of a Sustainable, Competitive and Secure Energy Policy. Opportunities and Shortcomings. Intersentia Publishers (31 Groenstraat, B-2640 Mortsel. Tel: (32-3) 6801550 - fax: 6587121 -Email: mail@intersentia.be - Internet: http://www.intersentia.com ). 2013, 457 pp. €149, £142, $209. ISBN 978-1-78068-064-4.
This book is the revised and updated version of a PhD thesis written at the legal faculty of the Catholic University of Leuven two years ago. It is based on the author's determination to verify whether the regulatory framework in which energy law and policy in the Union is currently developing is sufficient enough to ensure that this policy and member states have a competitive, secure and sustainable energy supply. Bram Delvaux points out that energy challenges and climate change are now and in the long-term the biggest tests facing the Union and its member states. He believes that the future is currently being played out before our very eyes and good decisions are imperative in the here and now. It goes without saying that Europeans have made a lot of progress but still have a long way to go. For a long time, member states have consider energy as a national security question and have all adopted different energy mixes. Some of them have promoted nuclear power, whereas others have opted for coal or more recently renewable energies. Nonetheless, we are all dependent on fossil fuels and therefore oil and natural gas producers, perhaps not in the same boat, are having to confront the same challenges, dependency on imports, rising demand and prices, environmental constraints, while remaining inexorably interdependent. This approach is based on different competitive energy policies that has suddenly become insufficient and which is all too obvious today.
Bram Delvaux considers that in this field the Union would be much stronger if the disparate action taken by the different member states and the regulatory competition they favour were abandoned. On this basis, he methodologically develops an overt appeal scientifically backed up, for developing a centralised European approach to energy. After providing a historical insight into European objectives in the energy arena and illustrating that they remain insufficient with regard to three different goals that need to be attained, he analyses the provisions in secondary legislation that were adopted in an effort to ensure the full opening up of the internal electricity and gas markets. This was done in an effort to ensure security in the event of crises such as power cuts and problems due to climate change. Delvaux subsequently points out that Union energy policy is still insufficient with regard to the results it has achieved and incoherent insofar as its three central ambitious objectives are concerned. In light of the treaties that preceded the Lisbon Treaty, he dissects primary law applicable to the energy sector in an effort to see whether this has hindered the development of an appropriate legal framework. He also looks at competition law, which remains as “vitally important” to the future of this sector as ever but which, on its own, will be unable to open up the electricity and gas markets and resolve all the problems. These difficulties are highlighted in his analysis of the relevant provisions in the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union. With energy figuring in the title of the Treaty of Lisbon, it has become undeniable that the Union and member states have a remit for regulating the energy domain but that this shared competence also implies that the Union complies, when it proposes measures in this field, to the principles pertaining to shared competences, subsidiarity and proportionality. The author's enthusiasm diminishes somewhat given that this new title should be related to Article 194 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union and which is nothing other than, “a simple codification of existing practices” in the energy field and that shortcomings, failures and constraints remain in place.
Given that he is not going to accept this situation lying down, the author includes a number of suggestions in his study with regard to how the Union can develop the institutional and legal means, as well as the indispensable objectives it should set itself in this area. He puts forward a variety of different approaches, such as promoting strengthened cooperation, concluding an agreement, similarly to the Schengen Convention, outside the Community framework, with a voluntary form of regional cooperation and the adoption of a new treaty specifically focusing on energy. In his view, these approaches are possible in practice: the former simply guarantee the fact that the triple objective can be attained, whilst the latter is still having to confront existing political and legal obstacles. This is why he is proposing to move forward by way of amendments to the existing treaties, for which he provides details in his conclusions. This remarkable book from beginning to end is certainly not without merit.
Pierre Bouvier
*** CARMEN MAGANDA, OLIVIER PETIT (Editors): Strategic Natural Resource Governance / La gouvernance des ressources naturelles stratégiques. Contemporary Environmental Perspectives / Perspectives contemporaines dans le domaine de l'environnement. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (1 av. Maurice, 1050 Brussels. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Regional Integration and Social Cohesion" series, No. 10. 2012, 241 pp. €38.50. ISBN 978-90-5201-899-7.
This book stems from a workshop organised by international researchers in Lille three years ago and seeks to examine the question of strategic natural resource governance. In the first half of the book, the authors tackle the subject in light of the different stakeholders, laws and concept of responsibility. In their introduction, Carmen Maganda (Political Science Laboratory at the University of Luxembourg) and Olivier Petit (University of Artois) explain that property rights are not the only way of looking at the relationship between rights and governance because there is also the question of how natural resources are managed and conflicts of interest that are the result of conflicts of representation in the relationship between man and nature and which consequently has an impact on the “hierarchy of objectives”. The form of property rights and natural resources are a way of defining relations between man and nature, environmental laws can be considered as the rights of human beings to a healthy environment. The editors of the book explain that environmental laws can be presented as universal and dependent on human rights, which is not at all the case with property rights, which not everyone on earth enjoy. This explains the increasing need for a model of governance based on sustainability and conciliation of different interests. All these issues are examined in the first part of the book in light of different case studies: oil exploitation projects in the western Amazon, the extraction of uranium in Niger, imports of toxic waste into western Africa, etc. The second part of the book involves contributions from four different authors who analyse the question of environmental governance by way of institutional reconfigurations and contemporary challenges. One of the urgent questions is how to involve civil society and develop a coherent management of resources in the context of the water shortages in Mediterranean areas of France.
(MT)
*** CHRISTOPHE BOUNEAU, DENIS VARASCHIN, LEONARD LABORIE, RENAN VIGUIE, YVES BOUVIER (Editors): Les paysages de l'électricité. Perspectives historiques et enjeux contemporains (XIXe-XXI siècles). Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (see address attached). "Histoire de l'énergie" series, No. 4. 2012, 273 pp. €37.50. ISBN 978-90-5201-893-5.
This publication results from a scientific colloquy organised by the History Committee at the Fondation EDF. The book contains seventeen contributions by historians, geographers, political scientists and landscape experts who examine examples of the often complex cultural relationship that has grown up in the field of electricity and the natural landscape. As pointed out by the historians Christophe Bouneau (Université Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux 3) and Denis Varaschin (Université de Savoie) in their introductory chapter, “from the first deployment phase of electric innovation in the 19th century and the construction of an electricity system that is both technical and economic, this new form of energy immersed itself in existing landscapes that were at the same time metropolitan, industrial and rural”. Pylons and industrial installations were welcomed as symbols of economic development and connection, in a single word, “entry into the modern world”. Today, they triumph as, “the new industrial aesthetic, that of invisibility”. There has been a subsequent and “incontestable decline of the general interest to the advantage of local services”, however, which have led to environmental challenges and a subsequent democratic deficit. Many other themes are also tackled in this book.
(MT)
*** STEFAN RÜB, HANS-WOLFGANG PLATZER, TORSTEN MÜLLER: Transnational Company Bargaining and the Europeanization of Industrial Relations. Prospects for a Negotiated Order. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, Postfach 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). “Trade Unions Past, Present and Future” series, No. 19. 2013, 313 pp. €63.30. ISBN 978-3-0343-0909-7.
This is the updated version of a book published first of all in German in 2011 but which now contains supplementary material. It examines the increasing influence of the European Enterprise Committees since the directive that led to their creation in 1994. Today, the European Trade Union Confederation estimates that almost one thousand of these bodies exist and which has led to the undeniable increase in transnational negotiations within the Union. The authors of this book are all actively involved in the Research Group on European and International Industrial Relations at the University of Applied Sciences at Fulda in Germany. Their particular inspiration results from their quest to scientifically examine the importance of these structures in relation to the workers, their scope as regulatory end employment instruments and ultimately their prospects for further development. In this book, three major questions are tackled: firstly, “is a new order in industrial relations emerging at a transnational group level?” The book then seeks to examine the way in which the negotiating process is shaped and finally, whether this phenomenon is a precursor, “of a more profound Europeanization of industrial relations”. Detailed responses are provided, based on their initial hypothesis that these European agreements represent a new development stage in industrial relations at a European level and that their novelty, at each individual episode of negotiations, has helped to form this new order. The three authors also base their premise on the fact that companies are the essential element at the core of this dynamic process. These ideas and other data are examined on the basis of 10 case studies (Daimler, Ford, Arcelor-Mittal, EADS…). There is also a chapter that focuses on the specific case of the metalworking sector. A variety of perspectives are assessed which, ultimately, lead the authors to confirm in their conclusions that transnational companies are the, “most dynamic pole of the Europeanization of industrial relations”.
(PBo)
*** MARIA KORDA: The Role of International Social Security Standards. An in-depth study through the case of Greece. Intersentia Publishing (see address details attached). “Social Europe Series” series, No. 32. 2013, 763 pp. €130, £124, $182. ISBN 978-1-78068-165-8.
Maria Korda has been convinced that the international social security standards elaborated by the International Labour Organisation and Council of Europe are appropriate and even decisive for cohesion and stability. She subsequently decided to focus her Ph.D. thesis on these issues, which she developed at the University of Tilburg. More specifically, she was eager to see why, over the years, these standards have not always been translated into effective protection measures and a guarantee of a decent social protection level for all. The results of this exploration are contained in this book in which she outlines the obstacles identified, analyses them and identifies those that have had the most negative consequences. As a result, she was able to explain how these different elements have interacted and puts forward a number of suggestions on how they can be overcome. She tackles this issue by providing a far-reaching study of the specific issue in Greece. Irrespective of the deep crisis that Greece is currently enduring, this country is interesting insofar as it has ratified over the years several different social standards and that it has (at least until just a short while ago…) a social security system that was rather well developed. A pertinent exercise also involved verifying implementation of these standards and the adoption of new ones in the context of different political developments stretching back to the dictatorship under the rule of the colonels and the return to democracy. The lessons drawn by the author also obviously appropriate for other countries too.
(MT)
*** REMBERT SÜß, GERHARD RING (Editor): Eherecht in Europa. Zerb Verlag (7 Wachsbleiche, D-53111 Bonn. Tel: (41-228) 9191150 - fax: 91911-59 - Email: zerb@zerb.de - Internet: http://www.zerb.de ). 2012, 1415 pp. ISBN 978-3-941586-53-6.
This impressive book includes a plethora of authors involved in the examination of matrimonial law in force in around 30 different countries or regions. The book begins with a general perspective including the presentation of sources of family law at European and international level, as well as the application of international family law in Germany and the marriage contract in relation to foreign origin. Several different authors, all involved in the legal arena (mainly notaries and lawyers from the different countries), analyse the system of matrimonial law in place in their respective countries. They therefore explore the different facets of this law in a variety of countries ranging from Spain and Russia, France and Germany, as well as many others.
(SH)