*** HUBERT VEDRINE: Sauver l’Europe ! Editions Liana Levi (1 place Paul-Painlevé, F-75005 Paris. Tél.: (33-1) 44321930 – fax: 46336956 – Courriel: editions@lianalevi.fr – Internet: http://www.lianalevi.fr ). 2016, 94 p., 10 €. ISBN 978-2-86746-850-6.
French foreign minister in Lionel Jospin’s government under President Jacques Chirac after being a close collaborator of François Mitterrand at the Elysée, Hubert Védrine is part of the category of French people who can only conceive of the European construction as being under the power of national sovereignties, especially those of the big countries. He demonstrates this again in this short book in which he starts by making this difficult-to-verify diagnosis: ‘Europe, or more accurately, the European Union, is in a serious state of dereliction or at least stupor.’ In the following pages, he analyses, as a doctor, bone-setter or charlatan, readers will decide... – the causes and nature of the illness that is eating away at the European patient, ‘this admirable construction, idealistic but also peremptory and partly artificial’ because of wanting to over-free itself from States.
The way the author sees it, there is no doubt, European elites in their ivory tower took the risk that the European project might one day be killed by citizens, the elites having sacrificed all to no-holds-barred integration, going as far as turning ‘legitimate attachment to sovereignty, an immense democratic conquest, into a weakness!’ The time for the revolt of the peoples has come, the rejection of the constitutional treaty by the French in 2005 being the first ‘veritable electoral insurrection’ before the Brexit earthquake. Today, he points out with some justification, EU member countries have around 60% of their citizens on average sceptical about the way the European construction is going (with Europhobes oscillating between 15% and 25% and traditional pro-Europeans between 15% and 20%, federalists and European activists no doubt not making up more than 1% but ‘still influential among some elites and in the media, thinktanks and business milieus....’). Against this backdrop of existential crisis, the author feels that bad answers were dreamed up by European activist circles, all arising from the ‘relentless institutional pursuit’ when ‘people’s aspirations for a closer democracy’ should proscribe any further recource to the European level. Clearly, it would be unhealthy to consider ‘greater dispossession of national democracies,’ and capitals should now urgently take this fact on board: ‘In order to save the European project, it must now be rethought and liberated from European dogma.’
The prescribed potions are the least irritating part of the book, although they do include some repulsive ideas. For example, the way the author invites governments to impose on ‘the Commission and Parliament an authentic normative diet through massive and drastic subsidiarity, ending the hypertrophied regulatory autism that is fed by States themselves.’ Recognising that the Juncker Commission committed to this path itself would have been more elegant than this logorrhoea. Basically, it is even worse because the former minister wants to be the white knight of slighted national democracies. He argues that it is ‘from the observation that excessive confiscation of democracy’ in the member states due to supervision by Europe that solutions to the current existential crisis need to be designed, the priority being to stemm ‘the common people’s growing disaffection.’ This is why he proposes a ‘pause’ in integration, accompanied by a ‘re-founding conference’ to which ’the European institutions would only be invited in a second stage’ because its aim would be to ‘bring the Commission back to its veritable original mission,’ that of being a ‘extranational’ rather than ‘supranational’ institution. This clearly proves that some French politicians have remained, when it comes to Europe, in the time of the Fouchet Plan, not resigning themselves to the European Union being only the sum – and the plaything – of its member states, but also that of European citizens, beyond their respective people. Hubert Védrine is no doubt not wrong to consider that what is needed now is to ‘re-interest and re-engage people exasperated by democratic dispossession,’ but surely he is wrong again, like other French politicians before him, about the capacity of states to faithfully translate at European level what their citizens want? With this posture, isn’t he rather confirming the complicity of executives that never cease to clamour about their people in order to take advantage of the European project to serve their own interests? Michel Theys
*** DOMONKOS SIK: Radicalism and indifference. Memory transmission, political formation and modernization in Hungary and Europe. Peter Lang (42-50 Eschborner Landstraße, D-60489 Frankfurt. Tel: (49-69) 780700 – Fax: 78070550 – Email: frankfurt@peterlang.com – Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 2016, 283 pp, €53.20, £45, $69.95. ISBN 978-3-631-67417-8.
How and why it it that an anti-democratic political culture tends to be emerging just about everywhere in Europe at the moment, including in confirmed democracies? It is to this burningly topical question that a Hungarian sociologist and philosopher provides scientifically argued responses in this book. Basing his analysis on the critical theory loved by Habermas, the author, who lectures at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, goes in search of what the preconditions of the emergence of antidemocratic political culture are in a democratic institutional setting, which leads him to look more deeply at political socialisation phenomena and, in particular, at transmission of memory. ‘Radicalism is inseparable from modernity,’ he states at the outset, explaining that the transformations that allowed the emergence of democratic forms of social integration based on rationality and justice also allow the emergence of... totalitarianisms, since ‘emancipation and radicalism have been opposing potentials of modernization throughout the history of European countries.’ This intellectual that Viktor Orban will certainly not be very keen on fleshes out these statements by firstly analysing in great detail the emergence of an ‘antidemocratic political culture’ in Hungary, where he shows that the Fidesz party in power and the far right party Jobbik, irrespective of how different they are from each other, bear witness to ‘Hungarian citizens' indifference towards the democratic principles, a fundamental lack of democratic culture.’ He then explains that the main cause for this, extending the scope of his observations a little, is that Hungary, like the other countries of central Europe has from the start ‘experienced modernization since the beginning in a distorted way,’ due to the way the past is lived because ‘party politics colonizes the sphere of public memory transmission which results in a vacuum of mutually accepted interpretations of the 20th century traumas.’ Hence, he says, Hungary has now become an ‘incubator of radicalism,’ its regions, all at sea during the transition, opening their doors wide to populist responses provided to answer the challenges of modernity, while others plunged into indifference. The problem is that this statement does not apply solely to Hungary, nor even to central Europe alone: based on studies carried out in these two types of region in thirteen other countries (Germany, Croatia, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia and the United Kingdom, along with Georgia and Russia), he sees the incubators of radicalism everywhere, which leave hanging a major threat to the whole of Europe! Clearly, this study (made possible by finance from the European Union...) desires a good place among the must-read books for European political leaders. (PBo)
*** DOROTA PIETRZYK-REEVES: Civil Society, Democracy and Democratization. Peter Lang (42-50 Eschborner Landstraße, D-60489 Frankfurt. Tel: (49-69) 780700 – Fax: 78070550 – Email: frankfurt@peterlang.com – Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). ‘Warsaw Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences,’ No. 6. 2015, 208 pp, €56, £45, $72.95. ISBN 978-3-631-66526-8.
The concept of civil society, or at least the way it his been used in analysis of the democratisation processes in post-communist central Europe, has not proved as useful as some had hinted it might. This is the main conclusion reached in this book by Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves ater ten years of research. Now a lecturer in political philosophy at Cracow’s Jagiellonian University, she was aiming at two objectives: i) verifying justification of the continued utility of the concept of civil society and, above all, gauging it particularly through the transition period in central Europe; and ii) contributing to the democratic normative theory that now puts the accent increasingly on democracy’s participatory and deliberative models. This is why she is interested in the question of citizenship against the backdrop of a deliberative democracy and in a public sphere considered as an arena for political participation. The author also looks at some of he issues post-communist European societies have had to face (and which some are still facing) following the collapse of the old system, be it corruption, citizen participation, the duty of accountability for politicians, the problem of ensuring democratic consolidation, with civic unity and the rule of state that this assumes... This is a learned tome that will delight political scientists. (PBo)
*** NADIA VALAVANI: Troisième memorandum: le renversement d'un renversement. Les preuves collectives d'une réfutation collective. Editions Livanis (98 rue Solonos, GR-10680 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3661200 – Fax: 3617791 – Email: webmaster@livanis.gr – Internet: http://www.livanis.gr ). 2016, 376 pp, €15.95. ISBN 978-960-14-3120-8.
What would normally take decades to take place in history is concentrated in the two-year period 2015-2016. The vast majority of the Greek people made a gesture of emancipation from the yoke of the Memorandums by making Syriza the leading party of the left in power in the European Union. This electoral act seemed to open up an unheard-of experience carrying the hope of a better social future. But that didn’t take into account the ‘lending partners,’ which began a veritable political and economic siege, unprecedented in recent history. In revenge, the common people provided the government with the enormous power of their ‘No’ vote in the referendum of 5 July 2015, capital that was dilapidated by the heads of the government and of Syriza in the form of a disastrous capitulation. The third memorandum is literally the proof of an ‘overthrow of an overthrow’ that tore Syriza apart. This is what is explained in this book by economist Nadia Valavani, member of that party and deputy finance minister with responsibility for taxation and public goods until her resignation on 13 July 2015, when the contents of the agreement with the lenders was announced, that was set out a month later in the third memorandum. Having abandoned Syriza since then, she explains how this capitulation in open country signed the Greece’s permanent colonisation and institutionised the only ‘kidnapping’ of national public income in the world. In this way, the ideas of the left have been flouted, not only in Greece, but at international level too since it is the neoliberal axiom that ‘there is no other solution’ that has won in people’s minds everywhere. With the persistent ambition of pushing back this dangerous doctrine that does not comply with this point in history, the author provides the personal documents that justify the action of those who entered the fightback back then and who do not want to lay down their arms. (AKa)
*** THANOS PAPADOPOULOS: Qui et comment nous ont-ils conduits à la faillite ? L’histoire de la période d’après les Colonels. Editions Gutenberg (37 rue Didotou, GR-10680 Athènes. Tél.: (30-210) 3642003 – fax: 3642030 – Courriel: info@dardanosnet.gr). 2016, 239 p., 9 €. ISBN 978-960-01-1828-5.
It was the crisis that led to the memorandums, not the other way round. Writer and jouranlist Thanos Papadopoulos explains in a critical manner in this book the reasons that led Greece to the brink of banruptcy. In so doing, he indicates that Greece wasted around 800 billon euros over the past forty years, or around 350 billion euros in European subsidies and 430 Billion in borrowed money. Where did all this cash go? He says it went to create partisan armies for political parties, the State and even society: in 1980, the total number of jobs with State remuneration accounted for no more than 400.000 people; in 2009, there were... 1.135 million state officials. Moreover, through legal and illegal loans, the State financed farmers, traders, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, engineers, industrialists, shipbuilders, phamacists, customs agents, unmarried mothers and more besides. In addition, the State provided early retirement pensions to people aged 15, 20 and 25, and also pensions for goalkeepers, taxi drivers, the blind, pregnant nuns and women about to give birth... paid every two or three months! All this using other people’s money! Currently a columnist for "Ta Nea" newspaper, the author provides much evidence to back up his accuasations and explain how Greece got trapped in a problem without a name. (AKa)
*** SAKIS MOUMTZIS: Syriza: escroqueries et désillusions. Editions Epikentro (9 rue Kamvounion, GR-54621 Thessalonique. Tel: (30-231) 0256146 – Fax: 0256148 – Internet: http://www.epikentro.gr ). 2016, 448 pp, €15. ISBN 978-960-458708-7.
Lawyer and member of the editorial committee of the Agonas (Struggle) review, Sakis Moumtzis brings together in this book documents written during the critical period for Greece of 2014 to 2016, which remain valid for understanding the political choices of the time and enlightening in terms of historical material for analysing behaviour. Among other studies, there is an analysis of the exacerbated political adventurism and rhetoric of that period, the six tragic months that led from the January 2015 elections to the tragic episode of the referendum, the myth of what were claimed to be tough negotiations, the way some flirted with the idea of Grexit, the profundity of the damage done to the country’s economy by all this regression studded with the signature of the third referendum, the drama of institutional slippage and the troubles then caused by the arrival of the first of the refugees. In the preface, Evangelos Venizelos, former president of Pasok and former deputy prime minister, says that ‘We can’t say that we’ve been bored over the past two years,’ immediately adding: ‘Quite the opposite. But the cost of this piece of theatre staged as both a drama and a comedy is very expensive and burdensome: the damage done during this period will fall on an entire generation. (AKa)