*** JEAN-LUC SAURON: Faites l’Europe, pas la guerre. Réformer la France – Réorienter l’Europe. Gualino éditeur (Lextenso éditions, 70 rue du Gouverneur Général Eboué, F-92131 Issy-les-Moulineaux cedex. Tel: (33-1) 40934000 – Fax: 40518185 – Internet: http://www.lextenso-editions.fr ). 2016, 69 pp, €9. ISBN 978-2-297-06131-5.
The title of this book,‘Make Europe, not War,’ harks back to the 1960s and May 1968, It is by a Frenchman who is a grand connoisseur and lover of the European project and who puts forward ideas that he hopes will be discussed in the campaign for the French presidential elections because, the way he sees it, ‘France’s role in Europe’ is a ‘key question for the country’s future.’ He is quite right, although he is not sure that he will be listened to. Either way, many points he raises in this short essay deserve to be taken into consideration throughout the EU, for example when this activist who lectures in European law in Strasbourg and Paris Dauphine invites all national political classes to ‘stop trying to palm off the crisis in Brussels as if it were the Old Maid card or a Jack of Clubs, a card you have to get rid off at all costs,’ because ‘this political posture’ will end up ‘multiplying national democratic crises and (…) weaken or destroy the EU27 collective shield.’
A Europe of 27 rather than 28 member states since Jean-Luc Sauron starts by taking note of Brexit and learning from it. He sees it less as a failing by the British, but rather as an unhappy consequence of the desire by some to turn Europe into a regional laboratory of ‘happy globalisation,’ a process that has led leaders and citizens to swim in ‘an atmosphere of political disengagement and reduction in state interventionism.’ Brexit therefore had ‘the merit of awakening the European world from its dream of political neutrality and disengagement from the affairs of the world,’ the British being even less to blame in that they have often expressed their ‘rejection of economic development that marginalises pursuit of the social well-being of all as a major public policy objective.’ As the member states’ political leaders constantly and wrongly claim that everything bad started in ‘Brussels,’ which ‘imposes its decisions in defiance of government demands,’ British citizens concluded, wrongly, that the only solution was to leave Europe. As this is also ‘what populist votes in the rest of Europe want to express,’ it is urgent for supporters of the European project to change tack, because it is a fact that scuppering the Union would amount to suicide for the member states. Among other things, it is therefore necessary to re-win the battle of public opinion to ensure the Union’s credibility in the world, which will be no mean feat because in Brussels, there remains only one non-mainstream newsletter about European affairs in the French language, namely that produced by Agence Europe, although the Russian authorities have installed a team there from Russia Today and the United States’ news website Politico has opened a unit in the city…
To address the changing and menacing new world opening up in front of European eyes without risking Europe turning into a bit player, Europe needs to recover and get a grip on itself. How? The author says firstly, it needs to reconstruct national democracy to give people control back over their European destiny. Among ideas he moots to this end, there is one about nationalising European questions, which is a way of saying that the democratic deficit that the European Union is claimed to be suffering from arose in most member states from national parliamentarians being kept at arm’s length by the executive. He lucidly argues for a scrapping of the myth of negotiations in Brussels being diplomatic in nature, being led solely by the executive, replacing it with joint monitoring by and the political responsibility of elected decision-makers in France. This would clearly be a good start in both France and many other member states in getting the better of populists and other nationalists from one extreme or the other. From this renewed national plinth, he then makes proposals to better associate European Union member states in ‘regional communities’ while respecting their national sovereignty and, finally, to form ‘strategic cooperatives’ in domains that escape from the EU’s powers, Are all these ideas wise? Perhaps not, but they are all pertinent in that they force the reader to think about what it would be possible to set up to prevent eurosceptics and Europhobes from having the final word! Michel Theys
*** 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 2016, No. 97, 84 pp, €9. Subscription: €40.
This issue of the progressive review from French-speaking Belgium is the last in a long series: approaching its twentieth anniversary and its hundredth issue, Politique will have a new look from the first issue to appear in 2017, which will also bring in changes to its subscription packages. Meanwhile, this fin de série issue includes a very complete and pedagogical report on Freemasonry and articles on, for example, the death of Shimon Peres (which, once again, turns ‘the living into amnesiacs’), oceans as the forgotten common heritage of COP21, Nicaragua that has gone ‘from Sandinistaism to Ortegaism,’ and the ‘scarred’ people of Burundi. While the editorial denounces the ‘DNA’ and ‘bronze logic of financial capitalism’ which makes it necessary to find an ‘alternative road,’ Jérôme Jamin depicts in very sombre tones the state of the European Union in light of the career of José Manuel Barroso, and also Jean-Claude Juncker, who finds himself accused of ‘using his experience in tax evasion to get the model of his country of birth accepted by the whole of Europe.’ The accusation seems excessive, as does the assertion that the Luxembourger arrived at the helm of the Commission ‘against public opinion, ‘ since he is the first to have been forced on heads of state by European citizens in a European election… (MT)
*** LEANDROS BOLARIS, KOSTAS PITTAS (Eds.): Crise dans l'UE et alternative anticapitaliste. Editions Librairie Marxiste (14-16 rue Fidiou, GR-10678 Athens. Tel: (30- 210) 5247584 – Fax: 5227177 – Email: marxistiko@yahoo.fr – Internet: http://www.marxistiko.gr ). 2016, 156 pp, €10.60. ISBN 978-960-7967-99-2.
March 2017 will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome that gave birth to the European Economic Community, a precursor of today’s European Union. A raft of celebrations will be organised to celebrate the event, none of which make any attempt to mask the current situation: the grand European project is in crisis. The European Union displays fissures that are as obvious as they are deep, be it in terms of economics or politics. These days, Europe that wanted to be a promised land for all the people within and around it, has arrived at a point where it is imposing brutal austerity on the weakest groups of people and raising fences to contain refugees, which makes it responsible for turning the Mediterranean into a maritime tomb for thousands of souls, while at the same time, racist terror and Islamophobia are on the rise. The authors, journalists working on Marxist newspapers, say the EU is revealing to the world its true nature, namely that of an organisation anchored in the needs of capitalism. The documents this book is based on tend to show that the anti-capitalist vision would have been wiser for realistic analysis of the path taken by the European Union and to generate an effective fightback by workers. (AKa)
*** LOUDOVIKOS KOTSONOPOULOS: Le consensus perdu. L'Etat social, le capitalisme, la démocratie. Editions Sakis Karagiorgas (16 rue Marathonodromon, GR-17671 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 9560807 – Fax: 9560807 – Email: idrymask@gmail.com – Internet: http://www.karagiorgas-foundation.gr ). 2016, 248 pp, €15. ISBN 978-960-7087-38-6.
How is it possible that so many Western societies are far richer than they were in the 1970s but the welfare state is much weaker than in the past, though all these societies now face the drama of constant austerity? The answer is found in a kind of consensus formed in each period of history between capitalism and democracy. This is pointed out in this book by Loudovikos Kotsonopoulos who, after lecturing in the history of social policy, currently conducts a seminar at the department of political science of Pantheon University entitled ‘the welfare state and capitalism: institutional transformations from the end of the Keynesian consensus to the current crisis.’ In this book, he addresses the various forms that this relationship has taken in the post-war period, referring to theories of the welfare state. He puts the emphasis on the paths that gave the welfare state legitimacy until the most recent capitalist crisis. (AKa)