Book Reviews McCormick, John. European Union: Politics and Policies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. xiii, 208. Index. $21.95. Jacques Delors once commented that history was accelerating, and that the European Union had to respond accordingly. Respond it has, and coming thick and fast are a new Treaty, the Euro and all that implies, and Enlargement. So it is a major weakness of John McCormick’s general introductory text, The European Union: Politics and Policies, that it was finalized some time ago and thus throws virtually no light on these recent developments. Curiously and less forgivably, it also seems to peak with the Single European Act and the Single Market Programme. It does limited justice to subsequent events, notably the geopolitical rupture of 1989 and German unification; the Treaty of Maastricht gets patchy treatment, and the 1995 enlargement is barely mentioned. Certainly, readers will find little illumination in the explanation of the Euro as exchange-rate cooperation (rather than a replacement for it, with monetary policy internalized and unified). Nor will they be much the wiser on the forces behind the inexorable emergence of ‘security and justice’ issues (culminating post-McCormick in little-remarked but fundamental provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam). On the other hand, McCormick’s book has several merits: it is readable, and – breaking the subject into digestible chunks – it gives an overview of theory, history, form (the institutions) and substance (the policies); all this in a manageable 300 pages. There are gaps (competition policy is one), the simplified sometimes tips over into the simplistic (on French peasant farmers, for example, or on the so-called democratic deficit), and some thematic juxtapositions can be odd (the Court of Auditors lumped with the Court of Justice?). But the treatment makes a change from the usual long march through the institutions. Moreover, McCormick’s judgments are mostly fair, notably avoiding the problem-dominated nature of much discourse on the EU. All the more reason to regret that he did not proffer more insight for his newcomer readers: to point out, for example, that widening and deepening are not mutually exclusive but go hand-in-hand; or that the importance of qualified majority voting or co-decision lies less in the detail than in their effect on negotiating behaviour; or that the fundamental feature of CAP reform is a shift from price support to income support, with different effects on the different agricultural lobbies. The EU is not an abstract game of ‘Go’ for political scientists, but a practical process aimed at resolving practical – albeit long-term – problems. On the political science front, the notion of ‘consociationalism’ – another snappy bit of terminology for the pubs and cafes – clearly has McCormick’s preference as an explanatory model for the way the EU works. This ‘government by a coalition representing the different groups in [a divided] society’ may well be worth probing deeper. At least it gets us out of the sterile federal-confederal rut. It remains a somewhat one-dimensional view, however, and different models may apply to different sectors: a fully federal economic system alongside a confederal foreign policy, with security and justice somewhere between. The EU as ‘post-modern’ state? Something for the next edition. Nigel Evans Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Tufts University
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