*** L'Europe en formation. Revue d'études sur la construction européenne et le fédéralisme - Journal of Studies on European Integration and Federalism. Centre international de formation européenne ('L'Adriatic,' 81 rue de France, F-06000 Nice. Tel: (33-4) 93979397 - Fax: 93979398 - Email: europe.formation@cife.eu - Internet: http://www.cife.eu ). 2015, No. 377, 176 pp, €20. Subscription: €50.
This issue of the review we owe to the high priest of radical federalism, Alexandre Marc, is largely devoted to a topic that only specialists are usually passionate about, namely demographics. Some of the figures quoted by Prof. Yves Charbit in the introduction, however, demonstrate that Europeans must not neglect this discipline in any way - or what it says about them and their future. Last year, for example, the continent of Europe had 742 million inhabitants, well behind Asia (4.397 billion), Africa (1.171 billion) and the continent of the Americas (987 million); its inhabitants were the richest in the world ($31,650 per inhabitant, compared with $29,902 for 'Americans,' $11,452 for Asians and only $4,720 for Africans; but it is also the continent where the fewest children are born and which has the highest proportion of old people. As for the European Union, it is the third largest demographic group after China and India (with 509.6 million people living there, compared with 1.660 and 1.336 billion respectively for China and India), and the people living in Europe have the highest gross national income of anywhere in the world.
The latter two figures call for reflection, because in a way, they talk about our future within humanity. However, as Yves Charbit (emeritus professor at 'Université Paris Descartes, where he set up and heads the Centre population et développement) points out at the start, the figures also raise a raft of questions. For example, is the low European birth rate the result of an old historical process or is it on the contrary due to a recent development? Is the higher income to be set against the birth and death rate, since European women have the highest life expectancy (81 years)? And more precisely, 'Does wealth lead couples to have fewer children in order to maintain their living standards?' The answers that can be given to these questions and many others are clearly the type to allow a projection in time. However, as is perfectly highlighted in this special report, these questions can also need to be carefully handled. Firstly because figures can - and in this case do - hide huge differences between the continent's four big regions: Northern, Western, Eastern and Southern Europe. Secondly and most importantly because, as Prof. Charbit observes, 'the purely quantitative measurement of demographic behaviour gives rise to as many questions as it answers for anyone who considers societies and tries to understand their complexity.' In order 'to give meaning to the figures,' demographics therefore needed to open up to other human and social science disciplines (history, economics, sociology, anthropology and so on) that are capable of dealing with data such as revenue, employment and education.
It is this two-pronged approach that is illustrated in the pages of this issue. Initially, quantitative data on the birth rate, families, mortality and ageing is analysed and discussed. In terms of the birth rate, Alain Ayerbe and Didier Breton, who both lecture at Strasbourg University, explain that a family and social policy aiming to increase the birth rate risks having very little effect if it does not support a 'real desire for children,' and they explain that the current birth rate system in Europe is the fruit of 'a change in society characterised by a reduction in inequality between men and women.' In terms of quantity, special attention is also paid to regions known as 'ultraperipheral.' All these analyses confirm Europe's persistent (although declining) demographic heterogeneity, whether it be between East and West, North and West compared with the South or even within countries. The second part is devoted to big society issues of interest vis-a-vis populations, be it health or education, while Yves Charbit analyses the economic, social and cultural implications of demographic differences among the twenty-eight EU countries and their partners in Arica, the Caribbean and the Pacific. A final contribution is devoted by John May to the issues underlying population policy, which are far more national than they are European. Michel Theys
*** DIMITRIS VENIERIS: La politique sociale européenne et les droits sociaux. La fin des hymnes. Editions Topos (2 rue Plapouta, GR-11473 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 8222835 - Fax: 8222684 - Email: info@motibo.com - Internet: http://www.toposbooks.gr ). 2015, 524 pp, €32.80. ISBN 978-960-499-053-5.
Addressed from a social and political viewpoint in this book, the social future is presented in very dark tones that hint that social policy is decreasingly concerned with social rights. The author, 'professeur agrégé at the Department of Social and Educational Policy at the University of the Peloponnese, however, explains that social rights are the roots of social policy. But here's the rub: its current new version desiccates and adulterates the essence of rights chiselled with a view to ensuring social justice, as it is a fact that the structural impasses of the global capitalist system do not fail today to leave many victims in their wake. However, this regression also has the consequence of making the hope live again for many people of a model of human development where political and social rights would be reconciled again. With this book that aims to make understood the role and necessity for European social policy, Dimitris Venieris studies social rights' contribution to the emergence of European social policy, starting from a theoretical analysis of dominant conceptions concerning them. He goes on to study the dynamic of this relationship, which could prove pertinent for Europe, but constantly takes into consideration all the pitfalls which might appear at European level and end up leading to regression in terms of social acquis at national level. (AKa)
*** TASSOS YANNITSIS: Le système social et la crise. Editions Polis (33 rue Eolou, GR-10551 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3643382 - Fax: 3636501 - Email: info@polis-ed.gr - Internet: http://www.polis-ed.gr ). 2015, 112 pp, €12. ISBN 978-960-435-498-6.
For the umpteenth time in Greece in recent years, the social system is the focus of concern - and it certainly won't be the last time that doctors qualified to a greater or lesser extent are at the sick bed trying to improve its state of health. Seven times minister in the socialist governments of Pasok, notably labour and social affairs minister and economics minister, Tassos Yannitsis - who is currently a professor at the Department of Economics at Athens University - writes in this book that the permanent state of uncertainty in which the Greek social system finds itself is a disaster, as it shapes economic, social and political behaviour and is having an explosive impact on the private life of citizens and the life of the country as a whole. However, he was himself the author of one of these reform plans for social security and pensions at the start of the decade that began in 2000, a plan that generated so much negative reaction that the Simitis government of the time decided in the end to withdraw it. Starting from this failure, he raises a series of disturbing questions: how many times have we exhausted both the people and the opportunities to act because the political system proved incapable of taking decisions of a type that could provide certainty and thus generate confidence? How many times have people with social insurance felt like they were ping pong balls, each serve sending the problem to another player, making it ever more insoluble? That was when the feeling grew that society was trapped and imprisoned, which made the search for solutions acceptable to the greatest number ever more difficult. The author argues that solutions can now only flow from a new grand social agreement, which cannot see the light without prior recognition of the errors and responsibilities of the past. As one can imagine, this will take a long time to achieve, the social system and Greek citizens therefore being destined to more long, problematic months. (AKa)
*** KATJA BRAUßE: Die europäische Patientenrichtlinie aus vertragszahnärzlicher Perspektive. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, P.O. 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Schriften zur Gesundheitspolitik und zum Gesundheitsrecht" series. 2015, 167 pp, €54.95. ISBN 978-3-631-66168-0.
The 2011 directive on the application of patients' rights in terms of cross-border healthcare, whose adoption lies within the extension of European Court of Justice jurisprudence, has sensitive repercussions for the work of dentists working for social security systems. Katja Brauße examines the question in this book by also highlighting the problems or shortcomings for which the directive was introduced: to what extent is it a barrier to the 'tiers payant' system (whereby a proportion of the fee for dental treatment is paid directly to the dentist by the patient's insurer), which is crucial to the German healthcare insurance laws? Are patients travelling to benefit from dental care abroad sufficiently protected in terms of the quality of care and safety, despite the foreseen authorisations and procedures? To what extent is the European level legitimate for legislating on this subject? The author attempts to answer these queries based on an analysis of the legal, financial and practical questions raised by the new rules. (GLe)
*** HesaMag. European Trade Union Institute (5 boulevard du Roi Albert II, B-1210 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 2240560 - Email: etui@etui.org - Internet: http://www.etui.org ). Second semester2015, No. 12, 54 pp..
This issue of the six-monthly publication of the European Trade Union Institute stands out again by its wealth and the quality of its graphical layout. It contains a highly detailed special report on 'women at work,' who - and this will not come as any great surprise… - are still 'seeking recognition' although progress has been made. Edited by Marianne De Troyer and Laurent Vogel, it invites readers in turn to 'put on gender spectacles to understand working conditions' (as it is a fact that 'part-time work is a central factor in rendering women's work precarious '), to listen to what the geneticist who became an ergonomist Karen Messing has to say in this connection, to take an interest in the 'gender' approach as support to help in the prevention of health problems that is being implemented in France, to examine the virtues of 'sorority,' to discover how labour inspections in Sweden went on a 'crusade against the exclusion of women,' to become aware of work that remains to be done to get individual protection equipment to take account of the different body shapes of women and finally to go to meet the last women miners in Europe (in the Balkans). Alongside this equally rich and enlightening special report, this issue also looks at the relaunch of health at work which, as the editorial by Laurent Vogel explains, will inevitably require 'social mobilisations,' and the use of pesticides that turns the European farming world into 'a silent Bhopal every day,' because 'researchers have found that farmers exposed to pesticides develop in their genome between a hundred and a thousand times more abnormal cells.' (MT)
*** NIKOS PANAGIOTOPOULOS, FRANZ SCHULTHEIS, VENIA DIMITRAKOPOULOU: Miroirs: contes polyphoniques d'un monde en crise. L'économie de la misère de la Grèce 2010-2015 et la misère de l'économie: la pensée cachée du « miracle » allemand. Editions Alexandria (133 rue Solonos, GR-10677 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3806305 - Fax: 3838173 - Email: alexpubl@alexandria-publ.gr - Internet: http://www.alexandria-publ.gr ). 2016, three-book box set, €31,80. ISBN 978-960-221-668-2.
Two professors of sociology, Nikos Panagiotopoulos and Franz Schultheis, and sculptress Venia Dimitrakopoulou had the conviction that arts and social sciences needed to be forged into symbolic weapons to enable a new form of intervention by intellectuals in the public space, this new intervention being vital at a time when the social world is being shaken and degraded under the impact of new international modes of domination. This three-book box set is a demonstration of their desire to take up this challenge. Deputy professor of sociology at Crete University, Nikos Panagiotopoulos is director general of the Sexual Equality Research Centre and vice-president of the European scientific group "Raisons d'action,"; professor of sociology at Geneva University Franz Schultheis is a member of the Swiss national research council and president of the Pierre Bourdieu Foundation, based in Geneva. With Venia Dimitrakopoulou, an internationally recognised sculptress, they base themselves on a Europe seen as a land of utopia leading increasing numbers of citizens to a nightmare these days in order, starting with the cases of Greece and Germany, to reveal the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. Their research, a kind of comparative radiography of the two societies, tends to show that the logic of global capitalism inevitably leads to a multi-speed Europe and tough social and historic changes. In 'L'économie de la misère' and 'La misère de l'économie,' they describe the daily experience of women and men lost in a social world without God or man, and how the present seems to deprive them of any possible and predictable future. Based on their quest, Venia Dimitrakopoulou explores at the material and symbolic level the contradictions of these human beings in the third volume, entitled 'Dialogues.' This is designed as a tool for rehabilitation and autonomisation, the fundamental objective shared by these three partners being to allow all these 'ordinary people,' who are living through this break from the doable, the possible and the permissible, to emerge from obscurity and gain social visibility. Basically to be able to turn into a mirror such that observers can recognise themselves in them and, through them, better understand their own social condition. (AKa)