Book Reviews Hrbek, Rudolf (ed.). Das Subsidiaritätsprinzip in der Europäischen Union - Bedeutung und Wirkung für ausgewählte Politikbereiche. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995. Pp. 158. DM 44. Among the ever growing list of publications on the principle of subsidiarity in the European Community, this volume - containing the papers of a 1994 symposium in Tübingen, Germany - stands out for its refreshingly clear language. The basic conclusion of almost all the contributions, which seek to examine subsidiarity from different institutional and issue area-perspectives, is that subsidiarity as a legal principle cannot meet the expectations of its promoters, in particular the German government. The reasons given are basically twofold. For one, instead of increasing the citizens' trust in the Community, subsidiarity opens yet another field for political turf battles, especially among the Member States and between the Member States and the Commission. Not surprisingly, of course, since the invention of subsidiarity was always a sort of fig-leaf to chastely cover the various deficits of the Community, above all its lack of transparency and public participation as well as the absence of a clear division of competencies between the Community and the Member States. Secondly, as the four sectoral studies of the volume - antitrust law, research and technology policy, company law and environmental policy - point out, subsidiarity as a legal principle does not have much effect on the policy outcomes. The legal structure of the Community has always been vested with norms and principles intended to ensure an adequate distribution of functions between the Community and the Member States - the principle of attributive competencies, but also norms that require a certain kind of adequacy for the Community to act in a policy area. An example of the latter is Article 7a EU Treaty, which permits in respect of the common market only measures that are necessary for completion of the market. If such provisions should not have managed to duly limit the Community's range of action, it is because of their vagueness and the absence of clear criteria. Merely adding yet another opaque concept seems then not very promising, particularly if one looks at the situation in Germany. An interesting way of rescuing at least part of the subsidiarity concept, albeit as a form of policy-making, is presented by Adrienne Heritier in her article on subsidiarity in the context of environmental policy. She describes subsidiarity as a strategy of policy implementation that replaces a hierarchical implementing system, where the Community sets one uniform standard equally binding for all the Member States, with a system that would permit the setting of different regulatory standards for different countries - by means of individual negotiations between the Commission and the Member States - according to the specific capacities of each country. The legitimacy of the process would be based on increased transparency and thus the possibility of better control by the public. Alexander Ballmann München
	© 1990-2004 European Journal of International Law All comments and suggestions should be sent to webmaster This site is part of the Academy of European Law online, a joint partnership of the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law and the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute. This file was last modified: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 12:32PM