*** PANAYOTIS SOLDATOS: Chroniques sur une Union européenne en mal de réforme. Repères d'orientation critique. Editions Academia (29 Grand'Place, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve. Tel: (32-10) 452395 - Fax: 454480 - Email: contact@editions-academia.be - Internet: http://www.editions-academia.be ). 2014, 206 pp, €20. ISBN 978-2-8061-0184-6.
The tone of this book is set in the very first paragraph of the introduction. Emeritus professor at the University of Montreal and holder of a Jean Monnet chair ad personam at Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 University, Panayotis Soldatos cultivates the art of indignation and constructive cursing as much as he does scientific rigour. Judge for yourselves. He points out that for a few years now, the eurozone crisis has been shaking “a Union already undermined by a process of institutional reform that is both insufficient and unfinished, by hasty and over-lenient enlargement, by a lack of innovation-effectiveness of national and European leadership, by a qualitative policy deficit…” Against this backdrop, rescue is sought through “reactive measures taken as emergency measures, often incisively, sweetened with the logic of the lowest common denominator, amidst cacophonic positionings and controveries, hijacked/hypothéquées by institutional weaknesses in governance, obscured by the inertia of a multi-arched European leadership that is segmented and suffering from a deficit of long-term vision, disrupted by electoralist-flavoured political cycles in the member states and structural-functional weaknesses in their political and socio-economic systems.” The pamphlet is written with feeling!
Some will no doubt feel that the arguments go far too far, but is that really so? If you take a close look, they are above all the expression of disappointment and fury. The disappointment of a man who has faith in the Eurepa integrated initiated by the Monnet-Schuman duo in the early 1950's and who sees his dream falling apart at the seams. The fury of a professor who refuses to accept the intergovernmental prescriptions that put the patient's very life in danger. For five years now, in his blogs, most of which are published as editorials on the French website Fenêtre sur l'Europe, the author has been revealing the perverse mechanisms that are at work. They are the professor's broadsides or outbursts of anger at the situations experienced - or rather, in his case, endured - at the European level in recent years. His often denunciatory analysis is always based on solid arguments, most of which are fully scientific. They are therefore pertinent, whether or not this is comfortable for people who are prepared to put up with the unsatisfactory. It is therefore useful to have his revised and updated writings gathered together in this book. They are listed thematically, with the author reviewing in turn “aspects of arrhythmia and erosion of the Union's institutional fabric” and “dysfunctional aspects of the European political system” before formulating some prescriptions and thoughts to take the high road out of te crisis.
Panayotis Soldatos' arguments are structured by a number of ideas. Firstly, there is his firm conviction that the “intergovernmental slippage” has successively weakened European governance to the extent of throw the mechanisms of ever stronger integration out of gear. He criticises the way that European leaders (some more than others) have sacrificed profundity on the altar of enlargement and have made things worse by the scandalous laxity demonstrated by the institutions and member states on the economic, political and legal fronts when it comes to accepting the most recent countries that joined the European Union. And then he points out the “disintegration” that is occurring in countries' capitals, be it in terms of most governments' loss of credibility, how the elite have handed in the towel when it comes to Europe, and then the citizen dissatisfaction that all these shortcomings generate. A tough message, but no doubt food for thought…
Michel Theys
*** MARIANNE DONY, JEAN-VICTOR LOUIS (Eds.): Le traité instituant l'Union européenne: un projet, une méthode, un agenda. Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles (26 av. Paul Héger, CP 163, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 6503799 - Fax: 6503794 - Email: editions@ulb.ac.be - Internet: http://www.editions-universite-bruxelles.be/ ). "Etudes européennes" series. 2014, 329 pp, €45. ISBN 978-2-8004-1565-9.
This book rescues from obscurity a stillborn treaty, carried by Altiero Spinelli until it was adopted by the European Parliament on 14 February 1984. This draft treaty to set up the European Union was the subject of an earlier book published by the Institut d'Etudes Européennes at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1985, which included a preface by the president of the European Parliament, Pierre Pflimlin, and incorporated article-by-article commentaries by the four lawyers who helped the MEPs draw up their draft constitution, namely Professors Francesco Capotorti, Meinhard Hilf, Francis Jacobs and Jean-Paul Jacqué. This new edition is enrichd with the speech given by Altiero Spinelli just before the vote, a preface by Profs. Jacqué and Jean-Victor Louis, an analysis by Prof. Marianne Dony of what happened to the advances made in this project, and also a postscript with the speech made by the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, at the European Parliament to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Spinelli Project. Does it make sense to look at draft legislation that never came into force? Yes, say the book's editors, because it is “essential that faced with the United Kingdom's demand for renegotiation, that countries attached to European integration, the biggest and longest-lasting of the revolutions in Europe in the twentieth century, should not be solely on the defensive.” It goes without saying that beyond a few ideas that are now outdated, the Spinelli Project remains a precious and hard-to-replace source of inspiration to this end.
(MT)
*** MAARTJE DE VISSER, ANNE PIETER VAN DER MEI (Eds.): The Treaty on European Union 1993-2013: Reflections from Maastricht. Intersentia (Trinity House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK. Tel: (32-3) 6801550 - Fax: 6587121 - Email: mail@intersentia.be - Internet: http://www.intersentia.com ). "Ius Commune Europaeum" series, No. 123. 2013, 642 pp,. ISBN 978-1-78068-206-8.
No fewer than thirty-six high-flying lawyers provided contributions to this very fine tome published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty on 1 October 1993. The authors all share the characteristic of having studied at Limbourg University, which later became Maastricht University, and the European Law Centre at the university. Following a short detour via the genesis of the Maastricht Treaty by the book's editors (pointing out, for example, that the European Central Bank would have been located in Amsterdam rather than Frankfurt if President Mitterrand and the Belgian prime minister, Martens, had not brought up the question of the location of the European Parliament as a question to be settled in advance…), the experts assess the legal and political innovations wrought by the Treaty that established in the European Union, along with the reasons why the negotiators made the changes that they did. In the book, they explain subjects as varied as the health, education and consumer policies, the establishment of the Ombudsman, the law of investigation granted to the European Parliament, subsidiarity, European citizenship, the three pillars of the Greek temple, the advent of the single currency programme and the failures encountered since then in the eurozone due to the “asymmetrical division between budget and monetary policy competencies,” not to mention the “differentiation between Member States in terms of participation in the law of the Union and the drawing up of its policies” which was introduced in Maastricht to suit the British. In each case, the case is examined, along with the counter-arguments, which gives great credibility to the occasionally highly critical judgements they make.
(PBo)
*** DAMIAN CHALMERS, GARETH DAVIES, GIORGIO MONTI: European Union Law. Text and Materials. Cambridge University Press (The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK. Tel: (44-1223) 326070 - Fax: 315052 - Internet: http://www.cambridge.org ). 2014, 1114 pp, £42, $70. ISBN 978-1-107-66434-0.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that this book has reached its third edition in that it is the work of specialists in European law- Damian Chalmers lectures in it at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and Gareth Davies at the VU University in Amsterdam - and a professor of competition law at the European University Institute in Florence. Since back in its first edition in 2006, it has been a reference work, which is reinforced in this latest edition with the addition of a chronology of the evolution of the European project and, above all, commentaries on how the multiform crisis of recent years has impacted on and shaped the nature of European Union law. Tables of cases that have gone through the European Court of Justice, treaties, instruments and other legislation, the equivalence of the various treaties and a very detailed index make this book virtually compulsory for people wishing to find their way around political, legal and institutional Union.
(PBo)
*** JEAN-FRANCIS BILLION, JEAN-LUC PREVEL (Eds.): New Deal 4 Europe. Pour un plan européen extraordinaire de développement durable et de création d'emplois. Presse fédéraliste (c/o Maison de l'Europe et des Européens, 242 rue Duguesclin, F-69003 Lyon. Email: ice@pressefederaliste.eu - Internet: http://www.pressefederaliste.eu ). 2014, 76 pp, €12.
This supplement to the September issue of the French federalist publication Fédéchoses… pour le fédéralisme (Issue 165) includes documents by academics and/or federal activists relating to the Citizens' Initiative New Deal 4 Europe that foresees the creation of two new types of own resource funding in the form of a financial transactions tax and a carbon tax whose income would allow the European Union to finance part of the public investment plan that the signatories consider to be crucial. According to the two compilers of these documents, this Citizens' Initiative responds to the concern that the instrument not be left in the hands of “only Europhobes and Eurosceptics,” but that it rather should aim at and allow the living forces of civil society to carry a project of a nature that can re-inspire confidence in Europe among citizens who feel disorientated amidst all the bad ways of intergovernmental management of the Union. Prof. Antonio Padoa Schioppa explains in the preface that the time has come for supranationality to be put to work to reclaim the power to choose and govern differently and finally use the “fundamental principle of subsidiarity” in a positive manner in order to ensure that crucial choices (such as in relation to energy, investing in research, environmental policy, advanced technology, common security and defence) are finally “decided upon and introduced at European level, the only level that is able to provide suitable responses in areas where the national level is not capable of producing them.”
(MT)
*** Politique. Revue de débats. ASBL Politique (9 rue du Faucon, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 5386996 - Email: secretariat@politique.eu.org - Internet: http://politique.eu.org ). November /December 2014, No. 83, 87 pp, €9. Subscription: €40.
This issue of a progressive Belgian review looks at the collapse of the Berlin Wall twenty-five years on, as experienced by Belgian journalist Jean-Marie Chauvier. His eyewitness report is particularly interesting in that it comes from a communist activist who was forced to step back from what was happening to “real socialism.” From this elegantly written personal document there emerges a homage to Rosa Luxembourg - who dared to say that “freedom is first of all freedom for people who think differently” - and to the role played Gorbachev, together with bitter praise for the “true genius of historical initiative,” Helmut Kohl, the gravedigger of the dream that on top of the dismantled Wall there would dawn a “more beautiful morning, a more human morning, (…) a third way between capitalism and state socialism.” This issue also looks at the European lessons to be learned from the Scottish referendum, with political scientist Anne Peeters calling on the institutions “to take a closer look at regional action” and to consider bringing the regions closer to the centre of European decisions, over and above the Committee of the Regions. There is also a brief presentation of the key thoughts of the indefinable intellectual who was André Gorz, who thought in the latter part of his life that it was necessary “to stop basing social life on work (in the sense of jobs) and to encourage the emergence of a society where work (in the sense of action) is liberating while at the same time giving meaning to human activity.” Surely there is food for thought here in these times of acute crisis, including at European level?
(MT)
*** GABRIELE DE ANGELIS, PAULO BARCELOS (Eds.): The Long Quest for Identity. Political Identity and Fundamental Rights Protection in the European Union. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, CH-2542 Pieterlen, Switzerland. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Lisbon Philosophical Studies - Uses of Language in Interdisciplinary Fields" series, No. 4. 2013, 239 pp. ISBN 978-3-0343-1083-3.
Is the legal and political constitutionalisation of the European Union now a thing of the past, swept aside by the doubts and delays that have been fuelling the multifarious crisis in recent years, along with (to a far greater extent) the intergovernmental manner in which it has been managed? The contributors to this book scientifically verify this question in the light of the fate reserved in practice for protection of fundamental rights, whose codification in the Charter devoted to them is described by political theory researcher Gabriele De Angelis (of Universidade Nova in Lisbon) as “the only survivor of this political project of constitutionalisation.” The book also examines the stances taken by courts and political authorities in the member states, the European institutions and the European Court of Justice.
(PBo)