La gouvernance économique européenne
Readers might have taken one look at this lengthy tome and assumed it would be dry as dust, as is too often the case with books on economy or law. However, Louise Fromont pulls off the brilliant feat of breaking down the institutional and legal developments that have reshaped European economic governance ever since the banking crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. She delivers a fascinating analysis of the social consequences of economic policies, in a timely reminder of why – and to what extent – social policy remains the poor relation of a Europe that is firmly focused on the market and economic growth.
As professors Emmanuelle Bribosia (ULB) and Arnaud Van Waeyenberge (HEC-Paris and ULB) stress in their preface, “the author highlights the incongruity created by the transformation of European economic governance between the newly acquired competences of the European Union in economic and social matters and the balances that can be brought to bear on these competencies at European level. This puts the EU in a position of being able to influence or even impose certain policies (of an ordo-liberal flavour) on the member states, but without adequate jurisdictional or parliamentary controls being possible at European or national level”. They go on to write that “over and above the consequences to institutional bounds within the EU, this incongruity has very weighty consequences for European citizens. Indeed, whereas economic governance implies a series of choices of a political nature, this research stresses that European citizens are unable to influence these choices, as the new governance makes it possible to override the electoral preferences expressed at national level. This dynamic, which largely overlooks the protection of the fundamental rights of the citizens, has caused economic and social distress that is completely without precedent in the history of European integration”.
“Within the field of European economic governance, the judicial and democratic legitimacies, institutionalised by the Court of Justice and the European Parliament respectively, have never enjoyed the same influence as inter-governmental and integrative legitimacies. The idea is that democratic and judicial control must be exercised at the appropriate level of responsibility. The sidelining of the Court of Justice and the European Parliament was therefore not a problem, as long as the member states remained in charge of the economic and social policies, which they were called upon to coordinate only within the Council”, Fromont argues. She adds: “the sovereign debt crisis, however, promoted a reinforcement of the responsibilities of the institutions and bodies in charge of the executive power within economic governance. They are now in the position to be able to steer national economic and social policy to an unprecedented degree or even, in the case of financial assistance, to impose specific reform and budgetary consolidation programmes. However, this development has not been accompanied by the creation of adequate checks and balances at European Union level. For one thing, the Court of Justice had to return a verdict against a backdrop of economic urgency and on political compromises that were difficult to achieve, so that it has had to be accommodating towards the institutional reconfigurations that were introduced during the sovereign debt crisis (…). For another, the national parliaments have seen their competencies in budgetary, economic and social matters more enshrined and dictated by the European Union, but without the reinforcement of executive power within the EU being accompanied by any significant increase of the prerogatives of the European Parliament”. The new economic governance, which is based essentially on the decisions of the Eurogroup and the European Council, therefore constitutes a “threat to the institutional balance of the EMU and therefore also to the EU as a union of law”.
On the basis of the cases of Greece, Portugal and Italy, Fromont then goes on to analyse the effects of the austerity policy and macro-economic adjustment measures on the fundamental social rights, in particular on salaries, pensions, healthcare systems and access to health care. She stresses that despite elements of language used in the financial assistance decisions, “the impact of the reforms on a social level were envisaged only at a planetary level, without constraints upon the Troika and the member states that are beneficiaries of these programmes”. “The negotiators did not really take account of the fundamental rights when steering the content of the programmes, but were guided more by concerns related to long-term viability and sustainability, to the detriment of considerations of fairness, accessibility and quality of public services”, Fromont stresses, adding that “this tone-deafness of the European institutions to the social distress that has affected the member states in financial difficulties was particularly problematic given that the EU institutions are required by article 9 TFEU to take ‘requirements linked to the promotion of a high level of employment, the guarantee of adequate social protection, the fight against social exclusion, and a high level of education, training and protection of human health’ into account when ‘defining and implementing its policies and activities’”.
Acknowledging that the European pillar of social rights “is the most visible and most symbolic response of the European Commission to the concerns of the citizens” and that its objectives are ambitious to say the least (well-being, sustainable development, balanced economic growth, price stability, etc.), Fromont points out that is not of a binding legal nature and that “contrary to the promotion of the pillar carried out by the Commission when it was adopted, it is no part of its role to confer new social rights upon European citizens”.
Examining the role and case-law of the Court of Justice, Fromont observes that the “balancing function [of the Court] between the objective of financial stability and the fundamental rights is such that it is unlikely that any breach of a fundamental right is ever acknowledged”. “Financial stability, as a higher objective, seems able to justify any infringement. The case-law of the Court of Justice has the effect of accentuating the imbalance affecting the protection of the rights of individuals against economic measures or instruments”, she writes, going on to add that “in this regard, although the Court of Justice finds a degree of support in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, it would also benefit from referring to the case-law of the European Committee of Social Rights (institution of the Council of Europe responsible for implementing the European Social Charter: Ed). That would furnish it with the tools it needs to take greater account of social rights in its examination of the proportionality of the anti-crisis measures”.
The work ends with a series of proposals aiming to simplify governance, reinforce its social dimension and set in place a framework of governance exclusive to the Eurozone. As regards the Eurozone, this would in particular include the creation of a specific Parliamentary assembly – or a committee of the European Parliament limited to MPs of the Eurozone only – that would have responsibility for such matters as control of the Eurogroup, of the approval of any macro-economic adjustment programmes and voting on a dedicated budget for the Eurozone. (Olivier Jehin)
Louise Fromont. La gouvernance économique européenne – Les conséquences constitutionnelles d’une décennie de crises. Bruylant. ISBN: 978-2-8027-7088-6. 738 pages. €145,00
Les nouvelles formes de guerre
This short work is a compilation of contributions from the French-language analysis platform of international security and defence, but also foreign policy, matters: LeRubicon.org, which was born from an initiative promoted by the Canadian Strategic Analysis Network, the Strategic Research Institute of the Military College (IRSEM) and the Centre Thucydide of the University of Paris Panthéon-Assas.
Amongst others, it contains an interesting article by Olivier Schmitt, lecturer in international relations at the Center for War Studies and head of the department for studies and research at IHEDN, on time as a factor in strategic questions. In it, the author stresses the importance that speed has taken in tactical and operational reflections. He reminds readers of comments made by General Jim Mattis on the invasion of Iraq in 2003: “we knew that speed was the centre of gravity (…). Speed equals success”. “Yet this theory of military victory centred on speed came up against the reality of the operational context of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000, forcing military organisations into incomplete and difficult tactical and doctrinal adaptations”, Schmitt observes, stressing that “armed forces whose theory of victory was based on speed of operations were used as international police forces tasked with managing permanent risks, thereby creating a conflict of timescales, illustrating the crisis of the post-Cold War strategy”. “However, this ‘need for speed’ remains central as a theory of victory, as shown for instance by the doctrinal development around ‘multi-domain operations’ (bringing together the informational, cyber and spatial: Ed). Similarly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have been initially planned as a swift strike manoeuvre ending with the fall of Kiyv, which illustrates that the ‘need for speed’ is not limited to the West”, Schmitt points out, going on to refer to contemporary developments on the battlefield that could call the primacy of speed into question. He notes, for instance, that at strategic level, “operations of informational war and, more generally, so-called ‘hybrid’ operations, aim to slow down or even paralyse decision-making capabilities in various ways”. At operative level, actions can also be slowed down, for instance by access-denial strategies. At tactical level, on the other hand, swift mobilisations continue to be useful “to create faits accomplis” and “the maturity and distribution of long-range weaponry certainly help to speed up the tactical pace”. In the view of the author, therefore, “the challenge is to rethink operative reflections in such a way as to avoid reducing speed manoeuvres, while taking account of the diversity of the acceleration or deceleration of operation,s depending on their nature and the level at which they take place”.
Colonel David Pappalardo (DGRIS) stresses that the “notion of cognitive war is in the ascendant in strategic reflections”, including in a NATO framework. “Stemming from a multi-disciplinary approach combining social science and new technologies, cognitive war aims directly to alter the mechanisms of understanding of the real world and decision-making to destabilise or paralyse an enemy” the author notes, explaining that “although competition in the informational and cognitive fields is nothing new, the digital revolution and the social mutations of war have exacerbated it, causing it to grow and achieve greater magnitude. First of all, new technologies make it possible to target a larger number of brains, above and beyond political and military decision-makers only. The swift and incessant distribution of information also gives the bonus of virality to the spectacular at the expense of the empirical: in this way, truth gives way to likelihood, reflex to reflection. The combination of these two tendencies results in a balkanisation of the real, which can be exploited by a rival acting with ill will to obtain indirect leverage over national decisions by means of large-scale manipulation”. Against this backdrop, Colonel Pappalardo identifies three lines of effort: (1) making steps to defend oneself against one’s uncertainties, individual or collective (which is done by identifying the cognitive biases that precondition mental maps, but also by the need to “shake off the utopia of a perfect vision of the battlefield made possible by technology alone”); (2) defence against permanent informational aggression and the opportunistic exploitation by an enemy of our cognitive biases; in the view of the author, this presupposes a “global multi-environment, multi-field and inter-ministerial approach, promoting better integration between cyber and informational fields”; on a military level, “C2 (command and control: Ed) architectures must remain resilient, in other words able to benefit from new technologies whilst limiting dependencies and the disintegration of human expertise as much as possible”, Pappalardo, adding that “the cyber-securing of networks and content is vital in this light”; (3) “the offensive war in the cognitive field is the third area of effort, although it raises ethical questions that must be neither dodged nor allowed to paralyse action in this field”. Although cognitive war is not a revolution in itself, it has the effect of “refreshing the art of deception and surprise in strategy by a prior clouding of the cognition of the enemy (simulation, dissimulation, intoxication)”, the author stresses, concluding that the “organisation of C2 must evolve to promote a better integration of effects in all areas (land, air, sea, extra-atmospheric) and all fields (cyber and informational)”.
“While economic and cultural exchanges have stagnated since the Sotchi summit of October 2019, Russia’s re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa has come about in the sustained rise of the Wagner group. This has been made possible by regional political instability and France’s lack of determination over its engagement in the Sahel”, argue researchers Maxime Audinet (IRSEM) and Colin Gérard (Institut français de géopolitique), whose article analyses one of the least familiar dimensions of Russia’s unofficial expansion into Africa, that of the sources and content of the “Prigozhin galaxy”, named after the boss of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is also active in the media (with control of 11 outlets and a network of 130 partner media). “This mechanism fabricates offensive and coherent narratives, some of which are a long way from reality, but all of which legitimise the Russian agenda, support its local circumstantial allies and discredit its strategic rivals”, the authors stress, adding: “updating the memory of Soviet support for the African movements of independence from Western imperialism, and how this was tailored to contemporary pan-African, sovereignist and anti-neocolonial discourse (such as that of Prime Minister Choguel Maïga of Mali) are the most significant characteristics of this”. On top of this come disinformation operations, such as the accusations of “crime against the Malian people” made against the French army by a false Twitter account (@diadiarra6) on 20 April 2022, followed the next day by the distribution of a video of a mass grave in Gossi. By way of response, the French authorities decided the same day for the first time to show the French media present on African soil (France 24 and TV5 Monde) declassified aerial images showing a group of individuals burying bodies and attributing an “informational attack” to Russian players, Audinet and Gérard report. (OJ)
Julian Fernandez, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer and Justin Massie (edited by). Les nouvelles formes de guerre. Le Rubicon. Équateurs. ISBN: 978-2-3828-4396-3. 143 pages. €12,00