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Bezig met laden... Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stagedoor Luuk van Middelaar
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.  nwhyte | Jul 14, 2019 |  geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Crisis after crisis has beset the European Union in recent years--Greek sovereign debt, Russian annexation of Crimea, unprecedented levels of migration, and the turmoil created by Brexit. An organization originally designed to regulate and enforce rules about fishing rights, wheat quotas, and product standards has found itself on the global stage forced to grapple with problems of identity, sovereignty, and solidarity without a script or prompt. From Paris to Berlin, London to Athens, European leaders have had to improvise on issues that the Union was never set up to handle and which threaten to engulf this unique political entity. And they have had to do so in full view of an increasingly disenchanted and dissonant public audience. In this candid and revealing portrayal of a Europe improvising its way through a politics of events and not rules, Luuk van Middelaar makes sense of the EU's political metamorphosis over its past ten years of crisis management. Forced into action by a tidal wave of emergencies, Van Middelaar shows how Europe has had to reinvent itself by casting off its legal straitjacket and confronting hard issues of power, territorial borders and public authority. Alarums and Excursions showcases the fascinating relationship between the Union and the European heads of government, and the stresses it must withstand in dealing with real world events. For anyone seeking to understand the inner power play and constitutional dynamics of this controversial, but no less remarkable, political institution, this book provides compelling reading. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)341.242Social sciences Law Law of nations International community Regional organisations European regional organisationsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (5)
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This book came out only last month in English translation (originally published two years ago in Dutch as De nieuwe politiek van Europa, but clearly updated as it includes many references to events of late 2017 and 2018). I vaguely know the author, and tidying up the house at the weekend found an invitation to a dinner we both attended several years ago. He was the speechwriter for the first full-time President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, but apart from that is political scientist, a philosopher and a perceptive analyst of what is really going on - constructively critical of the stories that the EU tells itself. I drew very much on the book in preparing my own recent talk on Brexit. In March, the Irish Times published a nice précis of his views, especially as applied to Brexit.
Several years ago, a senior (and British) EU official quipped to me that the EU's triumph is to convert difficult political issues into boring technical details. Van Middelaar dismantles this EU self-perception in forensic detail, first of all outlining several crucial recent cases where the politics was everything, and technical details held crucial political importance - the EU crisis, the Ukraine crisis, the refugee crisis, and the EU's response to Trump and Brexit - and then delving deeper into the EU's system of governance, showing that technocracy is not enough to satisfy the public's requirements for accountability.
I found particularly useful his point that the EU system was not built to include internal constructive opposition. It was deliberately and politically constructed as a massive peace project, removing the incentives for future conflict in Europe through economic co-operation. The EU works by consensus, expertise, technocracy, and grand coalitions. Even though almost all decisions by member states in the Council of Ministers are theoretically taken by qualified majority, in fact there are very few votes; there is a strong incentive to find a consensus. The same is true in the European Parliament, where unlike in a national parliament there is no group of members representing a potential alternate government.
This is both a strength and a weakness. Van Middelaar looks at the failures of the European federalist model (Commission as sole executive, Parliament as sole legislature) and analyses where opposition actually does happen in the current system: among governments, from the European Parliament, from national parliaments, from groups of opposition parties and from maverick forces. The EU has not yet accommodated all of these voices in its own political order, and it will take a certain change of mind-set in its leadership for that to happen. Van Middelaar doesn't say so directly, but it's more likely than not that the EU will adapt to the reality it has created; that's what has always happened before.
It's a book which will be of more interest to those who support the EU project than to those who oppose it (and of very little interest to those who don't much care one way or the other). Strongly recommended. (