*** WERNER SCHROEDER (Ed.): Strengthening the Rule of Law in Europe. From a Common Concept to Mechanisms of Implementation. Hart Publishing (Kemp House, Chawley Park, Cumnor Hill, Oxford, OX2 9PH, UK. Tel: (44-1865) 598648 – Fax: 727017 – Email: mail@hartpub.co.uk – Internet: http://www.hartpub.co.uk ). 2016, 299 pp, £69.99. ISBN 978-1-84946-708-7.
Is it true, as is said in some academic circles, that the European Union is currently experiencing a ‘crisis of the rule of law’ that is as jeopardising to the foundations of European integration as the sovereign debt crisis? in any case, no reasonable European democrat would deny that recent changes in Orban’s Hungary or in Poland under Jaroslaw Kaczinski’s Law and Justice party have seriously worrying aspects. This book therefore arrives at the right time for anyone trying to understand the exact role reserved for the rule of law in the European Union and the tools available to the EU to ensure its respect.
The first observation is that this notion from Article 2 of the Treaty on the European Union has taken time to assert itself. In the early 1960s, the president of the Commission, Walter Hallstein, was the first to talk about a ‘community based on law,’ and Prof. Werner Schroeder explains at the start that this man, who was close to Chancellor Adenauer, wanted in this way to indicate that the European Economic Community based its action on respect for the law rather than any coercive power over the member states. Clearly, observes the man who lectures in European public law at Innsbruck University, ‘the law of the Union only governs the 'normal condition”’ and wasn’t designed to be opposed to the member states in the name of a ‘state of emergency’ unforeseen at EU level, which explains the difficulty of credibly implementing the sanctions laid down in Article 7 lf the Treaty. The European Court of Justice, however, very quickly lapped up the concept of the rule of law, its case law initially restricting its scope to the Union itself and not its member states, and its content to questions of legal protection. It therefore took, explains Prof. Schroeder ‘several decades for the rule of law to acquire the status of, and to establish itself as, a principle of the Union's law.’ During its rise to power, the judges of the court in Luxembourg again played the role of precursors, firstly in 1969 when they identified ‘the fundamental rights as rule of law proprium of the then Community, and this without an express basis in the Treaties,’ and then in 1986 when they ‘qualified the rule of law as a non-written constitutional principle,’ thus paving the way for the role of those who drafted Article 2 of the Treaty of the Union once the concept of the rule of law had been mentioned for the first time in the conclusions document of the European Summit in Copenhagen in 1993.
The rest of the book is devoted to decrypting the strengths, weaknesses, manifestations and shortcomings in this slow but irresistible rise of the concept of a Union of law, bringing together leading academics along with high-ranking law practitioners, be they national or European officials or even judges. With them, the essential elements of the rule of law are reviewed in an in-depth manner (the principle of legality and the hierarchy of norms, access to justice and judicial independence, transparency, legal certainty, the principle of proportionality, how the European Union and the Council of Europe view this question, the mechanisms for implementing and/or strengthening it in Europe, the institutional implications it gives rise to, including the question of knowing who controls whom and the viewpoint of former MEP Eva Lichtenberger in this connection). Summing up their final chapter, which considers the rule of law against the backdrop of the constitutionalisation of the Union, Monica Claes and Matteo Bonelli of Maastricht University consider the path that remains to be trod before consolidating and eternalising the rule of law within the Union, observing that moving in this direction is indispensable for meeting the expectations of some member states and of European civil society more broadly. However, it would be dangerous for the Union to make progress in this domain in isolation, since this could damage its legitimacy. They conclude that it would therefore be better for ‘a shared rule of law culture’ to be created by concerted action by all players, from the Union and Council of Europe to citizens and non-governmental organisations via, of course, the member states.
Michel Theys
*** GIORGOS BAKATSIANOS: Le problème grec et le projet européen. Editions Papazisi (2 rue Nikitara, GR-10678 Athens. Tel:(30-210) 3822496 – Fax: 3809020 – Email: papazisi@otenet.gr – Internet: http://www.papazisi.gr ). 2015, 101 pp, €10.65. ISBN 978-960-02-2635-5.
The sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone is probably the biggest problem the European Union has faced since the end of the Cold War. Since it is set against a backdrop characterised by exacerbated international competition and geopolitical upheavals in the south of Europe, along with the major challenges of energy and immigration, this crisis has complex political dimensions that jeopardise the single currency and even, more broadly still, the European project itself, along with its acquis. Doctor of political, social and economic science, Giorgos Bakatsianos devotes this book to the question by putting Greece at the heart of his analysis and reflections. This ambassador who is currently active at the foreign ministry says Greece is the ‘weak link’ in the eurozone because of the chronic pathologies that its development model has suffered from. However, in the current multilateral economic crisis, it is of major geostrategic importance because its position and role in Europe are at stake. Resolution of the Greek problem will therefore have to form part of a broad European solution, which is already accepted theoretically but will need in practice for relevant mechanisms to be triggered. But this cannot happen effectively without strategic reform of the architecture of Europe. It is therefore the challenge of a revolutionary European reform that will need to taken up if one wants an effective democratic shield to protect the eurozone from the violence of the international market. Hence this key question asked by the author: will the European Union be able to turn the crisis into a historic opportunity to extend economic and political cooperation within itself in order to extinguish the fires smouldering within? (AKa)
*** The Federalist. A political review. Edif (8 Villa Glori, I-27100 Pavia. Internet: http://www.thefederalist.eu ). 2016, 88 pp. Annual subscription: €35 (Europe), €50 (elsewhere).
This issue opens with two editorials, one devoted to the great transformations that are taking Europe into the digital age (which, explains The Federalist, cannot be correctly managed without a federal system of government seeing the light of day so that the decisions passed are legitimised by citizens), the other devoted to ‘the need to unite Europe to save democracy.’ Although the changes brought about by globalisation are culturally destabilising people who find comfort in extremist and populist speeches, globalisation is nevertheless a stubborn fact that the phantom of returning to national protective borders will not be able to upset. The author explains that it is therefore important to read again most urgently the Ventotene Manifesto in which Altiero Spinelli and his accomplice Rossi explain that only supranational institutions will be able ‘to govern interdependence democratically,’ reason for which major new progress in Europe integration is urgently required. The other contributions include one in which Sergio Pistone considers the ‘crisis of the world order’ in the light of political realism and federalism, Alfonso Sabatino’s thoughts on the development of a sustainable European immigration policy, notes on potential European taxation and a potential Defence Europe. (MT)
*** Fedechoses… pour le fédéralisme. Presse fédéraliste (Maison de l'Europe et des Européens, 242 rue Duguesclin, F-69003 Lyon. Internet: http://www.pressefederaliste.eu ). March-April 2017, No. 175, 40 pp, €8. Annual subscription: €30
In this issue of the French Fedechoses review, in mourning for three of its very close comrades-in-arms, there are pertinent reflections by lawyer Daphné Gogou on the migration crisis. In order to get round the current insufficiencies and shortcomings, she suggests taking inspiration from the Nansen certificates that were issued to more than a million refugees and displaced people in the 1920s and 1930s to prove to citizens by means of a common European document to be issued to new arrivals at the borders of the Union that common management of the crisis is a stubborn, operational fact. At the same time, adds the chair of the politics committee of UEF Europe, it would inform the new arrivals that they were entering ‘a common, democratic and free area where rules and values must be respected.’ Jean-Guy Giraud looks at the errors committed by the people who pushed for immediate enlargement to the countries of central and Eastern Europe, the current political slippages prevailing there being proof that the ‘graft’ has not taken and, on the contrary, has contributed to contamination of the old Union. (MT)
*** NIKOS MARANTZIDIS, STATHIS KALIVAS: Les passions civiles. Deux nouvelles questions et réponses au sujet de la guerre civile en Grèce. Editions Metaixmio (118 rue Ippokratous, GR-11472 Athens. Tel: (30-211) 3003500 – Fax: 3003562 – Email: metaixmio@ metaixmio.gr – Internet: http://www.metaixmio.gr ). 2016, 96 pp, €6.60. ISBN 978-618-03-0663-7.
This publication follows on from the book ‘Passions civiles: 23 questions et réponses au sujet de la guerre civile,’ which has now sold more than 25,000 copies. Two new questions raised during presentations and discussions of the previous book are raised in this one: what does the Greek Communist Party (GCP) remember of the civil war and what was ideology’s role in it. Stathis Kalivas, professor of political science at Yale and editorialist on daily newspaper I Kathimerini, and Nikos Marantzidis, a lecturer at the University of Macedonia in Thessalonica, Charles University in Prague and Warsaw University, add through the answers they give to the broad interpretation of a complex and diversified event that divided a people and destroyed a country, damaging its collective memory and identity. In the preface, they express their hope that their work will encourage a ‘fruitful and detailed debate’ about a subject that is still painful and highly sensitive today, and for the book to demonstrate that it is possible to ‘think about and discuss a difficult past in a calm ans wise manner’ since, they add, it also proves that it is possible, despite ‘a number of popular national myths,’ for Greeks not to be ‘condemned to incessantly re-live a tragic past’ as they are worth more than the image they often feel they carry in their collective consciousness. (AKa)
*** ROBERT A. DAHL: Polyarchie: participation et opposition. Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles (26 av. Paul Héger, B-1000 Bruxelles. Tel: (32-2) 6503799 – Fax: 6503794 – Email: editions@ulb.ac.be – Internet: http://www.editions-universite-bruxelles.be ). "Ublire," No. 44. 2016, 266 pp, €9.50. ISBN 978-2-8004-1608-3.
This is the first French version of a book first published in English in 1971, but which has lost none of its topicality. An eminent political scientist who passed away three years ago, Robert Dahl takes an in-depth look at the concept of polyarchy applying to ‘relatively (but not totally) democratised regimes.’ After explaining how they differ from democracy, he establishes a classification and empirically analyses, as Prof. Pascal Delwit puts it in the foreword, ‘elements and dimensions capable of seeing a closed hegemonic regime become democratic,’ in other words ‘to accept dissent.’ The man who used to lecture at Yale University thus considered in a pioneering manner the elements that enable trajectories towards polyarchies to be understood (socio-economic dimensions, historic sequences and so on) which, as the political scientist from the Université Libre de Bruxelles states, is still perfectly enlightening today, in a ‘historic sequence of challenging the ‘inclusive’ dimension of a number of regimes that have extended suffrage or even introduced universal suffrage or relativising the importance of formal or substantial democracy in a phase of supranationalisation of political life that complicates the inclusive facet.’ (PBo)
*** MARC ROUSSET: Adieu l’Argent-roi ! Place aux héros européens ! Editions Godefroy de Bouillon (119 rue Lecourbe, F-75015 Paris. Tél.h2016, 491 p., 37 €. ISBN 978-2-84191-322-0.
These days, the far right has recruited intellectuals and Marc Rousset is one of them. Both ‘critical of civilisation and of Money’ and ‘an apology for heroism,’ this imposing book, whose gestation took him eleven years of work, sees him eruditely analyse the fundamental opposition between money civilisation and idealised heroism. The starting point of his reflections is a book written ‘in Gothic German’ during the First World War, namely ‘Händler und Helden’ (Traders and Heroes). The author starts by presenting this book (never translated into French) which opposes ‘England, the nation of shopkeepers, with heroic and warrior Germany.’ The remainder of the tome is a denunciation of the fact that in the minds of our contemporaries, careerism and materialist consumption have taken the place of the ideal, the sense of transcendence and the sacred, and this is leading Europe to its loss, as extremist intellectual Dominique Venner wanted to demonstrate when he committed suicide in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in 2013. (MT)