EUMAP (EU Monitoring, Advocacy Program), Network Media Program, ed. Television across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence, Summary 2005. Budapest: Open Society Institute, 2005. 338 pp. No price listed (paper), ISBN 978-1-891385-37-7.
E. M. H. Hirsch Ballin, L. A. J. Senden. Co-actorship in the Development of European Law-making: The Quality of European Legislation and Its Implementation and Application in the National Legal Order. The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2005. x + 174 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-6704-184-3.
Andrea M. Gates. Promoting Unity, Preserving Diversity? Member-State Institutions and European Integration. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 122 pp. $46.75 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-1293-9.
Pertti Joenniemi. The Changing Face of European Conscription. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. ix + 179 pp. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7546-4410-1.
Vincent Kronenberger, Jan Wouters, eds. The European Union and Conflict Prevention: Policy and Legal Aspects. The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2004. xxix + 614 pp. $180.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-6704-171-3.
Tom Lansford, Blagovest Tashev, eds. Old Europe, New Europe and the U.S.: Renegotiating Transatlantic Security in the Post 9/11 Era. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. x + 322 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7546-4144-5.
Hans W. Micklitz. The Politics of Judicial Cooperation in the EU: Sunday Trading, Equal Treatment, and Good Faith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxxiii + 538 pp. $130.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82516-0.
Neil Nugent. The Government and Politics of the European Union. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 619 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-3870-3.
T. R. Reid. The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. New York: Penguin Group, 2004. 320 pp. $16.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-59420-033-5.
D. R. Verwey. The European Community, the European Union and the International Law of Treaties. The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2005. 320 pp. $90.00 (paper), ISBN 978-90-6704-182-9.
Reviewed by Jonathan Steinberg (University of Pennsylvania)
Published on H-German (June, 2008)
Europe through the Looking Glass
As a former editor of a journal, I am familiar with the problem. Books on an important subject for which few qualified reviewers are available arrive at the office. Reviewers are hard to find, but the editor cannot bring herself to junk them. The pile grows larger and then a sucker appears who shows a vague interest in the subject. I am that sucker. I had approached the editors of H-German about my interest in reviewing recent work on the European Union. Seventeen books arrived. Four of them should have been sent to a European lawyer. Another concerned Polish-German plans to federate in the nineteenth century (I had not known there were any); another discussed the "European Idea" in impenetrable post-modernist jargon. The rest actually have to do in varying degrees with the European Union and these form the body of work under review here. I cannot judge how badly readers of H-German need to know about television regulation in the European Union, but I have included a work on this subject and other subjects perhaps even more arcane to make a general point: the EU generates an astonishing array of special and specialized subjects. A dizzying array of books presents itself to readers and reviewers alike, a display of often confusing diversity that mimics the current character of the EU itself, which has definite qualities that nonetheless resist definition.
In their work, Vincent Kronenberger and Jan Wouters devote 619 pages to one phrase: "conflict prevention." It appears in the draft EU Constitution of 2003 and the Lisbon Treaty of December 12, 2007. The subject is related to so many questions of constitutional power, foreign policy, EU growth and direction, bureaucratic procedure, and control and responsibility that the editors engaged a team of writers for the volume and the Directorate General of External Affairs of the European Union hired a completely different team of experts from across Europe to explain the key elements. The European Union starts these sub-networks of specialists, many doubtless very well remunerated, to deal with issues so dense that nobody outside the charmed circles of particular Brussels directorates has heard of them. This book belongs to the "insider" literature about the EU. It includes seven-and-a-half pages of acronyms. The volume attempts to explain how the EU does not belong explicitly to collective European self-defense organizations such as NATO or the Western European Union (WEU), but now has provisions which allow it to act as a single foreign political entity, especially in the case of "conflict prevention."
Titles like this remind via synecdoche that the EU is at once the most transparent and most opaque entity in the world--everything about it that one can imagine is open and available online. Readers who want to know the biography of each of the twenty-seven members of the European Commission Court of Auditors can find them on the web with their pictures and their résumés (whose narratives are available in all of the twenty-three languages officially in use in the European Union). Practically every regulation, institution, policy, or item of news related to the EU can be found--yet how it all works is not so obvious, even to experts. Sometimes the search for complete knowledge yields only a complete lack thereof; these books reveal that paradox perfectly. On one hand, insiders talk to insiders and meet each other at public expense in various European capitals to continue the conversation. On the other, only one newspaper in the entire European Union covers the EU exclusively, The European Voice, a weekly newspaper published in Brussels by The Economist Ltd. It carries news items with titles such as "Ministers Back German for ERBD Top Job" or "Irish MEP Gets the Emissions Trading Dossier." One of the most remarkable institutions of modern European history is treated in weekly news coverage that reminds me of the stories one might find in a typical small town newspaper: "Syosset Girl to Wed" and "Old Westbury Dealer Charged." Beyond the details that might interest the inhabitants of EU village are topics of broad scope and complexity. Yet the paper reflects the organization it covers: vast and complex issues are nestled in webs of detail and networks of personal contacts and careers.
Somebody who knows nothing at all about the EU's history or practice will find a useful introduction in T. R. Reid's The United States of Europe. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief for The Washington Post and was previously The Post's London bureau chief. His idea that the EU will become a United States of Europe seems to me (for reasons I shall explain) quite wrong, but he shows convincingly that the EU wields power far greater than even American egomaniacs like Bill Gates of Microsoft or Jack Welch of General Electric could imagine. The European Commission's Competition Directorate General broke up General Electric's takeover of Honeywell and has hit Microsoft with huge fines. Reid's account of Jack Welch's humiliation at the hands of Mario Monti, the EU Commissioner for Competition, is worth the price of the book on its own. As Welch paraded into the Monti's office, he said breezily, "Mario--call me Jack." The commissioner replied, "You can call me Signor Monti" (p. 100). After the EU had finally rejected the proposed merger, Welch got a telephone call from the commissioner: "The deal is over," Monti said quietly. "Now I can say to you, 'Good-bye, Jack'" (p. 103). Despite its commission of deeds that North American capitalists are likely to see as inefficient or obstructionist, the EU has occasionally been capable of impressive energy in implementing its decisions. For instance, Reid describes the extraordinary efficiency of the euro's introduction, the largest currency conversion in history. €600,000,000,000 in cash had to be ready on January 1, 2002: "There was amazing news. Everything worked. The ATM machines spit out the long awaited money like clockwork, and the big crowds that lined up to get their euros displayed a happy, celebratory mood--as the media dubbed it, a mood of 'Europhoria'" (p. 81). As these anecdotes reveal, Reid likes the EU because he thinks of it as the antidote to American arrogance and swagger, a working superpower, but one more civilized than the United States.
Neil Nugent provides a very different picture. He has written a standard textbook on the EU and the work under review is already the sixth edition. For the expert, as opposed to the slick American journalist, nothing can be easy. Who makes decisions? Nugent hesitates in providing a definitive answer. As the EU has grown, Nugent detects "a certain blurring of responsibilities as the dividing lines between who does what have become less clear" (p. 52). Heads of government in regular summits known as European Council meetings encroach on the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the Commission. The growth of a huge number of informal decision-making procedures has been spurred by the spread of QMV (qualified majority voting). One example here may suffice to illustrate the process. As Jim Brunsden reported, Sweden blocked a reform of the divorce laws. The Slovenian presidency suggested circumventing Swedish opposition by using "enhanced co-operation, which allows a group of eight or more member states to go forward with the adoption of a law when reaching agreement in the Council of Ministers has proved impossible. This law would then be binding only on this group."[1] In short: there is always a way to get something done.
Nugent includes a section on how budgets get set (indeed he has a section on everything) and describes how the "third financial perspective" (a fine specimen of "Euro-speak") established expenditure for 2001-06 and maintained a 1.27 percent ceiling on "own resources" (p. 433). In reading this, I thought there must be some mistake. The EU could not possibly have such a tiny budget as a share of Gross National Income. But it does. The online European Union Portal, Europa, confirms it.[2] In contrast, the United Nations Online Network in Public Administration and Finance shows that Central Government Expenditure as a Percentage of GDP in 23 developed countries averaged 39.6 percent during the years 1990 to 1995 and 36.8 percent from 1996 to 2002.[3] The European Union cannot possibly be Reid's super-state if it spends so little of the community's money.
In her lively and intriguing little book, Promoting Unity, Preserving Diversity?, Andrea Gates further explores the issue of decision-making by treating the relationship between the European Union and Member States in a comparative study of the European Affairs Committees (EACs) of the parliaments in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. She employs a methodology called "historical institutionalism" which, translated from political science into English, reflects insights about path dependency; that is, she means that institutions tend to go on in the same way for years. She shows that the "formal rules" of these EACs have remained unaltered almost from the period of the states' initial memberships in the European Union. She asks why the Denmark EAC helps to make policy and the Irish one does so little; she finds the explanation in the relationships among government, party structure, and majorities. Article 8C of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty is devoted to the contribution of National Parliaments (which was not the case when Gates finished her text). She concludes that the "EU legislative process is marked by, first, the dominance of EU elites who are, with the exception of Members of the European Parliament, not directly elected. Second, there is a lack of transparency which, when combined with the third characteristic of the EU legislative process, the absence of a means of holding EU elites accountable which ... continues to spur debate ... regarding the value of the EU's democracy" (p. 86). Gate's unflattering portrayal would supply EU critics with plenty of ammunition.
Some observers of the EU, like Glyn Morgan, have concluded that the only issue that will successfully force European integration is the matter of security. Tom Lansford's and Blagovest Tashev's edited volume, Old Europe, New Europe, and the U.S., considers the security problems of these two parts of the present European world. What makes this work fascinating and useful is the editors' decision to include articles devoted to security issues and the policies of states as small as Slovakia or the Netherlands and as large as the United States. That Lithuania and Bulgaria have security needs and policies to meet them is self-evident, but often ignored. In the collection, Dirk C. van Raemdonck shows how Dutch security policy has followed an Atlanticist, active line, while Belgium has been more passive and Europeanist. For both countries, the Maastricht Treaty (which committed them "to the principle of a common foreign and security policy") has raised new dilemmas (p. 89). These countries are often caught between a commitment to supra-nationalism and the uncomfortable prospect of EU security policy trumping national needs. As Mark Sedgwick explains in his article on Italy, in March 2003, the EU and NATO agreed to the "Berlin-Plus arrangement ... whereby NATO members may make assets available to the EU on an as-needed basis" (pp. 110-111). But Sedgwick also cites Osvaldo Croci's crushing judgment that "without a security culture, the EU is incapable of giving its own answer" to European security questions (p. 111). Sedgwick suggests that Italian security policy remains what it has been more for than fifty years: it grants absolute priority to ties with the United States, privileges NATO as a second priority, and puts in last place its alignment with the EU, as long as the EU never endangers either the first or second priorities.
Whether or not its members are united by their security concerns, daily newspaper coverage reveals local tensions around EU attempts to produce legal unity. In this light, Hans W. Micklitz's The Politics of Judicial Cooperation in the EU, a piece of legal research, should be on the shelf of all historians who want to understand the nature and growth of the European Union. In fact, historians should not only place this book on their shelves, they should actually read it. The volume begins with twelve pages of cases, a page full of treaties, two pages of EC Directives, three pages of Statutory Instruments and two of acronyms.
Like a good craftsman, Micklitz lays out the tools of the trade of legal scholarship: cases and constitutional provisions. From page one, I knew that I had a splendid work in my hands that addressed a fundamental question about the EU in exemplary clarity: is the European Court of Justice (ECJ) "transforming an international treaty system into a constitutional framework" (p. 1)? It became clear to me as I read on that this question helps us to understand what the EU really is--not a super-state but a growing, changing, evolving network of international and national legal systems. Micklitz writes so clearly and sets out the issues so precisely that a layperson can follow not only the issues but also apprehend the author's research agenda and methodology. In order to understand what is happening with the EU system, the reader needs to understand a few principles of EU law: direct effect and supremacy; three types of law (EU trade law, EU labor law and EU private law); and three fundamental questions (the ECJ's judge-made legal order; the role and function of social movements in using the ECJ for social change; and the legitimacy and accountability of judgments rendered). Micklitz also explains the importance of Article 234 of the EC Treaty, which provides for the preliminary reference procedure, "a mechanism for the courts of member states of the EU to obtain definitive answers to certain questions of EC law by referring a question to the ECJ (and, in principle, the Court of First Instance, following the Treaty of Nice). The purpose of Art. 234 is to ensure that EC law can be applied as equivalent across the Community."[4]
Micklitz next introduces the reader to three concrete cases--Sunday trading laws (an example of EU trade law); equality of treatment of men and women (an example of EU labor law), and "good faith," an English common law concept used to assess the validity of contracts (an example of EU private law). As Micklitz writes, "this book can be read as a contribution to the European integration process, or, more ambitiously, to European constitution-building from the bottom up" (p. 4). This remarkable work raises fundamental questions about the use of "rights" in the EU and the reaction of national legal systems to "judge-made" law. The political future of the EU may in the end depend on the questions explored in this book.
In Co-actorship in the Development of European Law-making, E. M. H. Hirsch Ballin and L.A.J. Senden offer an insiders' perspective on the issues Micklitz raises. Its readers sit on the edge of an intense conversation of remarkable frankness among the members of the Association of the Councils of State and Supreme Administrative Jurisdictions of the European Union at their Nineteenth Colloquium in 2004 in the Netherlands. The two editor/authors are Dutch lawyers, one a member of the Dutch Council of State, the other a professor of European Law at Tilburg University. The theme of the Colloquium was the "quality" of European legislation and its application in the national legal order. The authors prepared a very lengthy questionnaire and the body of the book contains responses from the representatives of the several member states.
Nothing else I have read has given me a greater sense of what it must be like to work in this strange world. Think of the problems: do phrases in EC law translate correctly into the twenty-plus languages of the European Union? Why did the Birds and Habitats Directive (yes, there is such a thing!) produce thousands of legal cases in Finland and hardly any in Portugal? What Micklitz calls the "preliminary reference procedure" (Article 234) has a different name in this book ("preliminary rulings procedure") and is applied differently in different countries. Indeed, they reveal that the EU has not formulated a common glossary of terms. France's Conseil d'état and Germany's Oberstes Verwaltungsgericht have no equivalents in common law countries, but other agencies perform similar functions. Or do they? How can civil law procedures be implemented in common law jurisdictions? EU law lacks legitimacy or, as Senden puts it, "Durkheimian social solidarity": "Grainne de Burca has pointed out that EU law cannot build on the 'underlying social solidarity' which in Émile Durkheim’s view is the normal state of affairs. The process in the Community sometimes appears as the reverse in which an attempt is being made to create solidarity through law, by declaring common principles and rights in the hope that these will influence the legal systems in the Member States as an integrating force" (p. 13).
How can EU law be better embedded? Does car rental fall within the "transport services" exemption from the consumer protection requirements of Directive 97/7/EC on the protection of consumers in respect of distance contracts? Here is a problem raised by the British rapporteur: "International problems arise because the VAT Directive has been created by VAT specialists who live on a VAT island. This is illustrated by the fact that 'economic activities' (roughly equivalent to 'business') has one meaning in the VAT Directive and another in the Competition Law Directive. Another example is that 'insurance agent' and 'insurance broker' are undefined in the VAT directive and that it came as a surprise to those responsible for tax compliance in the insurance industry that the Insurance Intermediaries Directive (Directive 77/92) contains definitions of these terms" (pp. 65-66).
Such dilemmas reveal a problem with which readers of articles about EU law in individual countries are equally familiar: the EU's left legal hand does not always know what its right legal hand has written. Yet, in detailing the difficulties of coordination, interpretation and comparison, the authors and the participants want the system to work and work well. They struggle for clarity on the meaning and significance of this unique experiment in European legal integration. Above all, they want to dilute the idea of European Union legal "supremacy" and replace it with a more accurate or more politically acceptable phrase, in this case, "co-actorship" and its equivalents in the twenty-two other official languages. Good will shimmers through every line of the text.
Turning from national to international law, Delano Verwey's The European Community, The European Union and the International Law of Treaties examines the EU from an international legal perspective. Does the European Union act as the "sole contracting party" in international agreements, both bilateral and multilateral, or must it act as a joint contracting party alongside the Member States? The answer to this question would have been much simpler had the European Constitutional Treaty been accepted. The EU would have then acquired a single legal personality as an international actor. Although this book was composed on the assumption that the constitution would be ratified--how ironic that Verwey's fellow citizens in the Netherlands helped to destroy it--the reflections on the international legal identity of the EU still have much to say to an interested layperson. Verwey show that from the 1960s on, the European Court of Justice determined that the then-EEC had "express powers" specifically defined in the founding treaties but had developed "implied powers" which enabled it to act as a legal entity in international law (p. 5). Oddly enough, and typical of the history of this remarkable entity, the creation of the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty blurred this distinction. The EEC had the power to act as a legal entity but Maastricht had not said that the new EU inherited that character. The ill-fated EU Constitution would have clarified matters since Article I-6 granted the EU whole legal personality. After the constitution failed to be ratified, EU constitution-makers went back to the drawing board and adopted the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. Once again the issue has been settled. A newly inserted Article 46 A of the Lisbon Treaty states: "The Union shall have legal personality." The European Central Bank has also been granted "legal personality" in Article 245a, paragraph 3, and it may confer such status on a subsidiary institution. So all will be well, if the twenty-seven Member States ratify this "treaty," which is, of course, not (repeat: not), a constitution. Although intervening developments make parts of Verwey's book less relevant, he shows how the EU "adopts practices that do not in any way conform to the general external practice of other international organizations. At the same time it cannot be equated with the external practice of the Member States" (p. 56). In his final remarks, Verwey confesses that the EU occupies "a singular and unique position" (p. 259) and to fix the legal anomalies, he recommends nothing less than "a renewed codification of the international law of treaties" (p. 268).
Television across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence--Summary 2005 comes from another of the specialized sub-communities generated by the European Union, the EU Monitoring and Advocacy Program of the Open Society Institute, "which monitors human rights and rule of law issues throughout Europe, jointly with local NGOs and civil society organization" (p. 9). Twenty countries participated in the report (not all were EU members). In each state, as OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti notes, the "deluge" of commercial TV stations has led to a "dumbing down" of public service content in many countries (p. 12). The survey makes a variety of policy recommendations and it also raises a series of crucial questions: should the "free market" model replace state television entities in the European Union and outside it?
In the next section the report assesses the position of private ownership and the concentration of ownership. It also considers the transparency of holdings and the independence of news coverage, or what may be called in America "the Fox News" effect. The report examines the EU's contribution to TV regulation and control. As with the Birds and Habitat Directive, there is here as well a Television without Frontiers Directive. According to the Europa Portal, Directive 89/552/EEC, "Television without Frontiers aims to ensure the free movement of broadcasting services within the internal market and at the same time to preserve certain public interest objectives, such as cultural diversity, the right of reply, consumer protection and the protection of minors. It is also intended to promote the distribution and production of European audiovisual programs, for example by ensuring that they are given a majority position in television channels' broadcasting schedules. The Directive establishes the principle that Member States must ensure freedom of reception and that they may not restrict retransmission on their territory of television programs from other Member States. They may, however, suspend retransmission of television programmes which infringe the Directive's provisions on the protection of minors"[5]. Clearly here, as in all the other fields, the EU has spun a fine filigree of regulations and directives that creates a kind of supra-national legal system and insures a degree of uniformity throughout the entire EU. Of the TV directive, as indeed of the thousands of other directives, a tiny percentage of the Union's citizens have the faintest awareness. 500 million people live under this fine web of laws and do not know what it spans. They know--vaguely--that EU law exists and they occasionally come into contact with, or take advantage of, one of its provisions. The EU faces an insuperable PR problem. It cannot make what it does simple or transparent, because nothing it does is either simple or transparent.
Despite its best legal efforts, the European Union has no monopoly on "European" activities. Other institutions with European prerogatives include the Council of Europe, NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the WEU, the European Free Trade Association (made up of Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland and complete with its secretariat and Brussels bureaucracy), the European Organisation of Telecommunications by Satellite (EUTELSAT), the European Space Agency, and many regional organizations. One of them, the Nordic Council of Ministers, has financed a Nordic Security Policy research program at the University of Uppsala. Its report on the future of European conscription, edited by Pertti Joenniemi, appears under the title: The Changing Face of European Conscription. The book discusses the present and future of conscription in the national contexts of Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, all of which belong to the EU, and Norway, which does not. As the editor observes, the idea that conscription has now become "out-dated" rests on a narrow, purely military reading of the phenomenon. It has existed since 1793 and the levée en masse has been an essential form of nation-building. These essays collected here are shrewd, informative, and would potentially be very useful to historians of Europe, if they were written in better English. No native speaker seems to have been asked to edit contorted phrases, clumsy structures and misused colloquialisms. The essays themselves have also taken on some very Anglophone additional distortions borrowed from post-modern jargon. Every third word is "discourse" and much is made of "self" and "other." All this is rather sad, because the relationship between conscription, national identity, historic circumstances, and military theory in societies as comparable as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden offers, or could have offered, a very effective ground for comparative history and ideology. Even with this caveat, the book should interest historians of modern nation-building.
This review has not been easy to write and will, I fear, not be easy to read. The struggle to define the EU has led me into the dense thickets of union legal activity and forced me--and the reader--to cope with abstruse terminology and incomprehensible practices. The European Union has grown its own dialect--Eurospeak--and originated a pullulating swarm of bodies, committees, agencies, consultancies, academic research institutes and specialist scholarship. No author represented in any of the works examined in this review can give a precise definition of the European Union, either how it has been or what it is now. It expands silently and inevitably into and across the lives of 500 million citizens. It regulates the air they breathe, the food they eat, the homes they inhabit, the refuse they produce, the cars they drive, the fuel they purchase, the radio they hear, and the TV they watch; the computers, cell phones, and I-Pods they purchase, and the shops that sell them. The dream of the enlightened bureaucracy has at last been attained.
The EU is the paradise of Sir Humphrey Appleby of "Yes Prime Minister," the Prussian Herr Doktor Oberst vom Staat, or the French Enarque. These officials can run a Directorate-General secure on the foundations of the thousands and thousands of decrees, regulations, position papers, court decisions, and agreements that literally nobody outside the EU can decipher. They can--at last--bring us that enlightened, rational state which shimmered like an unreachable phantom before the eyes of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great or Joseph II. In his Reverie (1763), Joseph II expressed the conflict well: To be in a position to do all the good which one is prevented from doing by the "rules, statutes and oaths which the provinces believe to be their palladium, and, which, sanely considered, turn only to their disadvantage, it is not possible for a state to be happy, for a sovereign to be able to do great things.... God keep me from wanting to break oaths, but I believe that we must work to convert the provinces and make them see how useful the despotisme lié (limited despotism) would be to them."[6]
Joseph II saw traditional feudal rights as the obstacle to enlightened rule but in our modern democracies, it is the people and the associated NIMBY effect which makes it impossible to govern reasonably. My partner, Marion Kant, has put it well: nobody gets elected by getting the rubbish efficiently collected and recycled, but anybody can lose an election if the job is not done. In this context, I draw the reader's attention to the spectacular Neapolitan "Crisi di rifiuti" of the last few years, which contributed to the fall of the Romano Prodi government and created a new entrepreneurial opportunity for the Camorra. Today there is no Joseph II to hate, just dozens of ministers of health meeting in Brussels in the Council of Ministers: EU commissioners whom nobody remembers and laws that nobody can cite, let alone comprehend. The EU administers very well and has the power to consider best practice. Concealed behind its transparent opacity, it gives Europeans a government they have not deserved, do not realize they want, and cannot now escape. It is also amazingly cheap.
For the Kaczynski twins or Nicolas Sarkozy or Tony Blair, however, it provides a wonderful scapegoat. Politicians can pander to nationalist and Euroskeptic segments of their population, but the EU goes on administering better recycling rules and issuing stricter carbon emission regulations and more uniform codes of competitive practice--whatever national politicians do or say. It also offers the Slovak minister of justice the chance to fly to Brussels, stay in a terrific hotel, be ferried about in a big black car and strut the great stage four times a year at the Council of Ministers, giving interviews to Slovak TV against the colorful display of flags in front of gleaming modern EU buildings. It is a very different entity from the United States of Europe that Jean Monnet hoped would emerge from his initiative, but it really works. And it cannot now be stopped. It will not mind in the least if I fail to offer you a tidy definition of it. That, I suspect, is just the point.
Notes
[1].Jim Brunsden, "Sweden could be left out in the cold," European Voice, March 6-12, 2008, 4.
[2]. Online European Portal, at http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l34011.htm (Accessed May 24, 2008).
[3] United Nations Online Network, at http://www.unpan.org/statistical_database.asp (Accessed May 24, 2008).
[4]. "Preliminary Reference Procedure," The K-Zone, at http://www.kevinboone.com/lawglos_PreliminaryReferenceProcedure.html (Accessed May 24, 2008).
[5]. "TWF Directive," at http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l24101.htm (Accessed May 24, 2008).
[6]. Andrew Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire (New York: Penguin USA, 1997), 229.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.
Citation:
Jonathan Steinberg. Review of (EU Monitoring, EUMAP; Program), Advocacy; Program, Network Media, ed., Television across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence, Summary 2005 and
Ballin, E. M. H. Hirsch; Senden, L. A. J., Co-actorship in the Development of European Law-making: The Quality of European Legislation and Its Implementation and Application in the National Legal Order and
Gates, Andrea M., Promoting Unity, Preserving Diversity? Member-State Institutions and European Integration and
Joenniemi, Pertti, The Changing Face of European Conscription and
Kronenberger, Vincent; Wouters, Jan, eds., The European Union and Conflict Prevention: Policy and Legal Aspects and
Lansford, Tom; Tashev, Blagovest, eds., Old Europe, New Europe and the U.S.: Renegotiating Transatlantic Security in the Post 9/11 Era and
Micklitz, Hans W., The Politics of Judicial Cooperation in the EU: Sunday Trading, Equal Treatment, and Good Faith and
Nugent, Neil, The Government and Politics of the European Union and
Reid, T. R., The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy and
Verwey, D. R., The European Community, the European Union and the International Law of Treaties.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14637
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