*** LUUK VAN MIDDELAAR: When Europe improvises. Ten years of political crises. Editions Gallimard (5, rue Gaston-Gallimard, F-75328 Paris cedex 07. Tel.: (33-1) 49541697 - fax: 45449403 – Internet: http://www.gallimard.fr ). Collection "Le débat". 2018, 412 pp., 24 €. ISBN 978-2-07-273492-2.
Originally published in Dutch, Luuk Van Middelaar's latest book will obviously arouse the interest of all those who strive to understand the way the European Union is evolving, as well as the unease and even the resentment of those who are not prepared to take for granted the fruit of the author's ideologically oriented interpretations. A historian and political philosopher, he was for five years running the "pen" of Herman Van Rompuy, the first stable president of the European Council; no doubt it was then that the historian removed himself to his home to give way to an activist, erudite but stubborn to a fault, on intergovernmentalism...
Luuk Van Middelaar's whole point is to show - and to demonstrate - that the European Union has been experimenting for about ten years, with difficulty, upon an "event policy" in which it improvises politically to face the challenges that are accumulating before it. The author strives to highlight how the real "European political leaders" operated without having an "adequate toolbox" when the Union was confronted with four dangerous emergencies: it is on the strength of his proximity to Herman Van Rompuy that he provides a useful insight into the way in which the European Council, and the politicised Europe it would embody, have managed the euro crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, the migrants' crisis and the Atlantic crisis, the latter opening with the "Brexit shock".
Intellectually, this approach would be fully legitimate if the author did not take liberties with history. According to him, the "politics of the event" embodied by the European Council would take the place of the "legal politics of the rule" devised by Jean Monnet to impose "economic and legal depoliticisation". At a time when it was a question of sharing steel or cod quotas, the obscuring of "basic political motivations and convictions" was acceptable, this "technocratic approach" having delighted "bureaucratic apparatuses, both in Brussels and in the capitals"; it is no more, says the author, now that tens of thousands of refugees are to be sent away... As a result, the Commission finds itself at odds, as it was master of the "policy of the rule" and which, faced with the rise of the European Council, would have sought, under President Jean-Claude Juncker, to favour its "parliamentary politicisation" in order to become, one day, "a kind of European government".
This is not to the taste of Luuk Van Middelaar, who disagrees with Paul-Henri Spaak's assertion in January 1962, when the Fouchet Plan was maturing: "Europe will be supranational or will not be." In his opinion, De Gaulle was right to want an intergovernmental Europe, regardless of the Brussels fundamentalists; likewise, Margaret Thatcher was not fatally wrong to claim in her time for "our own money back", except in the eyes of the defenders of the "Promise" of an ever more united Europe. And the author surreptitiously slips that the excommunication of which both were victims "has its equivalent today: Viktor Orban is not a European."
In the historian's view, the European Council today makes the Union "more democratic" because it creates "a public space", the political subjects it deals with attracting the attention of all citizens, whatever their country. When it is "fully convened " (i.e. in the presence of... "officials" such as the presidents of the Commission and the European Parliament, the latter for a shorter period of time), it must be understood, he asserts, "as a ‘collective president’ of the Union". As a result, while more and more citizens express their mistrust of the Europe that is supposedly being ‘built’ in their name, the author asserts that the European Parliament must stop being "blinded by the promise of a federal future" and acknowledge "its role in the Union as it exists today", which requires a "mental shift: from one executive to another, from the Commission to the European Council". Luuk Van Middelaar, a curious historian, never mentions the Schuman Declaration, which clearly indicated that the European Federation was the objective pursued; on the other hand, he considers that "the opposition in principle to the federal project (...) characterises the tormented will of the peoples of Europe to preserve their individual voice in the European democratic space". Could this "tormented will of the peoples of Europe" not rather be turned against the Europe that the members of the European Council are drawing up, deprived in most cases of any legitimacy at European level since they are elected on national programmes? Is it not time, above all, to give European citizens a voice so that they can finally say the Europe they want, without their voices being distorted by the servants of the nation states?
Michel Theys
*** THEDOROS GEORGAKOPOULOS (under the direction of): The next Europe. Twenty texts on the future of the European Union and Greece's position on it. Editions Dianeosis (7 rue Granikou, GR-15125 Maroussi. Tel.: (30-213) 0023000 - E-mail: info@dianeosis.org - Internet http://www.dianeosis.org ). 2018, 245 pp., 9 €. ISBN 978-618-82833-3-6.
About two out of ten Greeks believe that in ten years' time, the European Union will no longer exist. Many of them think that it will have become "a more united federation of states". What is the most realistic scenario? What do the experts think? What are the main challenges facing the Union today and how could it shape its future? What position will Greece take on this issue? Journalist Theodoros Georgakopoulos, an expert on European issues, collected answers to these and other questions from 20 political leaders, academics, former and current Commissioners and senior Commission officials and members of other European institutions. As a result, the themes are addressed from very different angles. For example, President Jean-Claude Juncker makes his proposals for the future of the Union explicit in his text, while Commissioner Pierre Moscovici strongly criticises the way in which the European institutions have managed the Greek crisis. Together, the twenty texts make up a complete and realistic mapping of the possible European future, thus delivering - surprisingly - an undisputed message of optimism. The texts of the Greek Commissioners, both past and present, analyse more specifically Greece's position in the European institutions. (AKa)
*** OLIVIER LE BUSSY: The European Union, a utopia in peril? Presses Universitaires de Liège (41 place de La République française, Bât. O1 - 7th floor, B-4000 Liège. Tel.: (32-4) 3665022 - fax: 3665798 - E-mail: presses@uliege.be - Internet http://www.presses.uliege.be ). Collection "Small Collection MSH". 2018, 138 pp., 10 €. ISBN 978-2-87562-178-8.
Olivier le Bussy, who has been covering European news for the daily La Libre Belgique for the past ten years, analyses with lucidity and rigour, in these pages, the multifaceted and downright existential crisis in which the European Union has been stuck for the same period of time. With foresight because, as the former Socialist MEP Véronique De Keyser points out, "he is not ruling out the possibility of the Union's bankruptcy, which would empty itself of its initial project". With rigour because it is methodically, without any pathos or wooden tongue, that he reviews the various problems that are now combined to shake the democratic model everywhere in European countries and make people fear for the survival of the Union: "The worst is not certain but it could happen", he observes at the outset, rightly stating that "the current functioning of Europe is reaching its limits in terms of efficiency and democratic legitimacy". After having soberly summarised what is currently dividing Europe (the acrimony and dialogue of the deaf between the north and south of the euro area, the sun setting in the east for democracy and the rule of law, the "double crash test" that is the migration crisis), the journalist is doing a useful job by launching himself "in search of European democracy". In vain. After noting that "citizens do not demand the end of the EU, nor less Europe", he went straight to the point by observing that, "over the course of European construction, the EU's democratic model has gradually modelled itself on that of national democracies, but not to the extent of creating an accomplished supranational democracy". As a result, "citizens (...) do not really have the opportunity to influence European political orientations". The disenchantment of the Union as a citizen is clearly the consequence, regardless of whether the European Council likes it or not, and he adds that its legitimacy "as a 'collective head of state' of the Union is (...) questionable", to the point that the sphere of Heads of State and Government is squarely "in a blind spot of democracy". It would also be audacious to rely on the European Parliament to redress the democratic trend, since it is true that "elections aren’t European but in name" and that MEPs are "put out of the picture by the Member States" when it comes, among other things, to the European Council, the Eurogroup or the Troika that took place in Greece, "the worst example of what happens when technocracy takes over". After having shown, in two other chapters, how fragile the European promise of prosperity was (partly because "citizens and SMEs pay the price of tax competition") and how Europe was becoming "more and more alone in the world", Olivier le Bussy comes to some undeniable conclusions. The one, for example, that "the European hybrid model, a mixture of federalism and intergovernmentalism, is reaching its limits both in terms of efficiency and democracy". This one then, which results from it: "The great challenge of European democracy is to bring out a European people capable of expressing collective political choices that go beyond national horizons." But can we count on national leaders to meet this challenge? (MT)
*** The Federalist Debate. Papers on Federalism in Europe and the World. The Einstein Center for International Studies (26 via Schina, I-10144 Torino. Tel/fax: (+39-011) 4732843 - E-mail: info@federalist-debate.org - Internet: http://www.federalist-debate.org ). 2018, No. 3, 64 pp. Annual subscription: 15 € / Internet: 8 €.
Jean-Claude Juncker's speech at the last Lecture Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa is included in full in this issue of the Federalist Debate. In it, the President of the Commission points out that Economic and Monetary Union was designed to "offer protection, prosperity and progress to Europeans", which implies in particular that the current economic upturn "benefits everyone". Mr Juncker reviewed the progress that had been made in completing Economic and Monetary Union to this end, calling again for "a strong budget line" for the euro area and for it to speak with a single voice since, "within a few decades, no European country will be able to claim membership of the G7 because of its economic size". For his part, Lucio Levi devotes the editorial to the two ways of regaining control of a globalisation that is supposedly "abandoned to the free play of market forces", namely protectionism - unfortunately favoured by President Trump - or multilateralism. The editor-in-chief of the magazine is two federalists, the "founding father" of the United States Alexander Hamilton and the German Friedrich List, who considered that "the organization of the world into sovereign states (...) prevents trade exchanges from occurring in conditions of equality", thus making protectionism legitimate. To overcome the problem, it is therefore necessary to work towards the creation of a World Federation in the long term and, in the immediate future, towards "strengthening and democratizing" the World Trade Organization. Other topics covered in this issue include the role that the carbon tax could play in reviving the Union, the future of the World Federalist Movement, the possible creation of a world parliament, the rise of Asia... (PBo)
*** DIMITRIS SOTIROPOULOS: Greek civil society and the economic crisis. Editions Potamos (48 rue Xenokratous, GR-10676 Athens. Tel.: (30-210) 7231271 - fax: 7254629 - E-mail: info@potamos.com.gr - Internet http://www.potamos.com.gr ). 2018, 152 pp., 11 €. ISBN 978-960-545-073-1.
After 2010, civil society has made contradictory progress in Greece. This is the phenomenon that historian Dimitris Sotiropoulos, director of the graduate program "Governance and Entrepreneurship" at the University of Athens and editor-in-chief of the magazine "Nea Hestia", analyses in these pages. While they had moved away from traditional political participation through parties, citizens have since claimed their rights and made claims against the State more intensely and more often than in the past. For the author, this obviously benefits democracy, which is reinvigorated in a more participatory state. On the other hand, civil society would also have been a crucible for groups and movements that do not simply seek to confront the institutions of representative democracy, but to destroy or overthrow it. In summary, the crisis has been a catalyst for the empowerment of civil society, which has taken place in both democratic and undemocratic ways. Has this phenomenon radically changed the situation? To this question, the author answers both yes and no. Thus, with regard to informal civil society, the crisis has strengthened its presence, either in the field of promoting welfare activities, where the welfare state is weakened, or in social protest. However, this rise in power is sometimes accompanied by manifestations of "anti-statism" in an area that the State had monopolised for decades. It should be noted that the book is punctuated by an extensive bibliography. (AKa)