experiment for a new europe
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Book reviewed: Design for a New Europe John Gillingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 287pp., ISBN 0521866944
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ohn Gillingham, Professor of History in the University of Missouri, is the author of European Integration, 1950–2003 (Gillingham, 2003), a major historical interpretation of the building of the European Union (EU). On their website, his publishers Cambridge University Press, describe the integration of Europe as the most significant European historical development of the past fifty years and cite the praises of many eminent historians for Professor Gillingham’s innovative re-interpretation of this process. It is thus a surprise that in this, his latest book on the subject, Professor Gillingham concludes that the EU has ‘long since broken down’ (p. 1), is ‘the misshapen product of policy entrepreneurship’ (p. 39), that it is ‘undemocratic and unrepresentative’ (p. 40) and has become a brake on growth from which Europe ‘must be released if it is to prosper’ (p. 55). He goes on to assert that the ‘notion of Europe as a single economic and political bloc is becoming obsolete’ (p. 220) and in
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his final chapter he advocates a redesign of the EU that would involve: (i) the abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy; (ii) the abolition of regional funds that transfer resources to Europe’s poorer regions; (iii) shutting down the elected European Parliament; (iv) cutting the staff of the European Commission from 18,000 to a mere 500; and (v) disposing of all the EU’s properties. In his scheme, the EU would continue to exist but would confine itself to enforcing its competition and State Aids laws, managing external trade policy and preserving a liberalised internal market. Meanwhile, it would also be enlarged to include Turkey, Ukraine and all of the Balkans, bringing its population from a present 461.2 million to 634.2 million. It is interesting that Professor Gillingham does not say whether the European Court of Justice (ECJ) would be allowed to continue, although it seems likely it too would be abolished if he takes sufficiently seriously his criticism of the ECJ’s judgement in 1964 that its decisions on matters of EU legal competence take precedence
european political science: 5 2006 (352 – 361) & 2006 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/06 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
over those of national courts. We are given no idea of how the EU’s single market and common competition rules, which Professor Gillingham so enthusiastically supports, might survive if twentyseven or more individual national courts were in a position to make diverging interpretations of EU rules without the ECJ being able to make the final authoritative interpretation. His view, baldly stated, is that while state-led, top-down integration in Europe may have been necessary fifty years ago in a world where capitalism and democracy had broken down and could not be recreated by individual states on their own, this is today no longer necessary. Now that capitalism and democracy have be
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