No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Law, politics, and pragmatism in the European Union and the United Kingdom - Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage by Luuk van Middelaar. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2019, 301 + xviii pp. ISBN: 978-1-78821-172-7 - Britain and Europe in a Troubled World (The Henry L Stimson Lectures) by Vernon Bogdanor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020, 176 pp. ISBN: 978-0-30024-561-5
Review products
Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage by Luuk van Middelaar. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2019, 301 + xviii pp. ISBN: 978-1-78821-172-7
Britain and Europe in a Troubled World (The Henry L Stimson Lectures) by Vernon Bogdanor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020, 176 pp. ISBN: 978-0-30024-561-5
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2023
Abstract
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
- Type
- Current Developments: Book Review
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society of Legal Scholars
References
1 Middelaar, L van Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bogdanor, V in Britain and Europe in a Troubled World (The Henry L Stimson Lectures) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
2 Pragmatist philosophy forges a link between affirmative answers to questions such as ‘What is useful?’ and ‘What works?’ and truth. See for example James, W Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]) p 98Google Scholar (‘[Y]ou can say … “it is true because it is useful”’).
3 van Middelaar, above n 1, pp 156–157 (on ‘[t]he promise of a new era without war’ in which ‘[l]aw would replace power politics’).
4 Ibid, pp viii, 10, and 11.
5 Ibid, p 6. See also p 9 (‘guardian of the regulatory framework’).
6 Ibid, pp xviii and 166 (‘technocratic overreach’).
7 Ibid, pp 162 (‘jerky transformation’) and 171 (‘return of History’).
8 Ibid, pp ix and 162.
9 Ibid, pp 34 (‘emergencies’), and 162 (‘whirling events’).
10 Ibid, p 199.
11 Ibid, p 123.
12 Pocock, JGA Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
13 Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 117 (referring to Pocock, above n 12, p viii).
14 Ibid, p 145.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid, p 176.
17 Ibid, pp 156 and 165 (where van Middelaar draws on Koselleck, R Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar).
18 Ibid, p 169.
19 Ibid, p 38.
20 Ibid, p 11.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid, p 206 (‘Events-politics demands … the ability to take rapid decisions’).
23 Ibid, pp 113 and 289 fn 18.
24 Ibid, pp 54 and 206.
25 Dewey, J ‘Context and thought’ (1931) 12(3) University of California Publications in Philosophy 203Google Scholar at 206.
26 Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 11.
27 Van Middelaar worked as a speechwriter for the European Council's first permanent President, Herman Van Rompuy, between 2010 and 2015: ibid, p ix.
28 Ibid, p 179.
29 Ibid, p 93. The source of the distinction between ‘the ethic of conviction’ and ‘the ethic of responsibility’ is M Weber ‘Politics as a vocation’ in Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) p 77.
30 Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 93.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid, pp 165–166 (where van Middelaar draws on Dewey, J The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1954 [1927]) p 54Google Scholar).
35 Ibid, pp 114, 231, and 266–267.
36 Bogdanor, above n 1, p 51.
37 Ibid. The Treaty of Rome 1957 created the Common Market (which came into operation in 1958).
38 Ibid, p 50. See also pp 38 and 68.
39 Ibid, p 54.
40 Ibid.
41 R Tombs This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2021).
42 Ibid, p 150.
43 Bogdanor, above n 1, p 83 (where Bogdanor also argues that each of these contributions was due, ‘in large part’, to Margaret Thatcher).
44 Ibid, p 54.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid, pp 54–55.
47 Ibid, p 56.
48 Ibid, p 61.
49 Ibid, p 68.
50 Ibid.
51 Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 116.
52 Treaty on European Union (2007), Art 50.
53 Van Middelaar, above n 1, pp 117 (‘eternal fidelity’) and 141 (‘old habits of perpetuity thinking’).
54 Bogdanor, above n 1, p 72.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid, p 76.
60 Ibid, p 119.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid, p 124.
63 Ibid, p 125.
64 Ibid. (Andrew Duff is a Liberal Democrat former MEP and a proponent of European federalism.)
65 Bogdanor, above n 1, p 127; cf Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 248 (‘The Union is not moving towards becoming a single state …. [I]t is and will remain incontrovertibly a union of states in the plural’).
66 See Sumption, J Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics (London: Profile Books, 2019) pp 100–101Google Scholar (on the capacity of the state in the UK to adapt to ‘major changes in our national life’ and on ‘experience’ as something that ‘counts for a great deal in human affairs’).
67 Ibid, p 34 (where Sumption describes the UK's ‘unwritten constitution’ as ‘infinitely flexible’). See also Sumption, J Law in a Time of Crisis (London: Profile Books, 2021) p 206Google Scholar (the UK's constitution ‘works … because it is adaptable enough to accommodate unforeseen future change’).
68 Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 62.
69 Ibid, p 200 (where van Middelaar notes that the euro summits he describes ultimately came to rest on a distinct legal foundation, the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (2012)).
70 Ibid, p 61.
71 Ibid, p 62.
72 Ibid, p 113.
73 Ibid, p 62.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid, p 14.
76 Ibid, pp 179 (‘crisis-tamer’), 180 (‘impasse-breaker’), 181 (‘strategist’), and 251 (‘de facto executive’).
77 Ibid, p 178.
78 Berlin, I The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996) pp 1–39Google Scholar and 47.
79 Ibid, pp 46–47. See also p 50 (on ‘the improvisations of gifted leaders’). See also Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 37 (on the European Council's efforts to put in place a European Financial Stability Facility as a ‘tour de force’ of events-politics).
80 Bourdieu, P On the State: Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992 (Cambridge: Polity, 2014) pp 99 and 331–332Google Scholar (on capital as a set of ‘resources’, including ‘organisational techniques’, that make it possible for those who wield power in a society to respond to ‘difficult situations’).
81 Hart, HLA ‘Discretion’ (2013) 127 Harvard Law Review 652Google Scholar at 661.
82 Berlin, above n 78, p 37.
83 See above n 13 and associated text.
84 Van Middelaar, above n 1, p 72.
85 Ibid, p 71. On experience, see also Sumption, above n 66, p 100.
86 For a critique of the ‘Utopian’ assumption that it may be possible to identify ‘laws’ that afford a basis on which to ‘govern’ social life on an entirely settled basis, see Berlin, above n 78, p 37.
87 While alive to these tendencies, Van Middelaar makes only fleeting references to their most obvious expression, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's draft Constitutional Treaty: see van Middelaar, above n 1, 220 and 224.
88 Fuller, LL ‘The forms and limits of adjudication’ (1978) 92 Harvard Law Review 353CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 353 (where Kenneth I Winston, who edited the article after Fuller's death, notes that he applied the label ‘eunomics’ to ‘the theory of good order and workable arrangements’).
89 Since he published Alarums and Excursions, van Middelaar has written on the EU's response to the Covid-19 crisis. See van Middelaar, L Pandemonium: Saving Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.