European Fisheries Law. From Promotion to Management – By Till Markus

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2010.00528_3.x
• Published date: 01 September 2010
• Author: Aðalheiður Jóhannsdóttir
• Date: 01 September 2010

eulj_528685..694

BOOK REVIEWS

Political Accountability and European Integration.Edited by Luc Verhey, Philipp Kiiver

and Sandor Loeffen. Groningen: Europa Law Publishing, 2009. 171 pp. Pb. €40.00.

EU scholarship has seen several ‘turns’ during the last decade—most of them are

theoretical, but some have also been empirical and even methodological. The most

notable ones have been the institutionalist turn (eg Aspinwall and Schneider, Bulmer,

Olsen), the constructivist turn (eg Checkel, Risse), the deliberative turn (eg Eriksen

and Fossum), the governance turn (eg Kohler-Koch), and the government turn

(eg Egeberg, Trondal). These turns have contributed to bringing EU scholarship

closer to the mother disciplines of political science, law and economy, and also to

bring these disciplines into mutual interaction. It may also have turned EU scholar-

ship into more generic research compared to the sui generis EU studies that charac-

terised the 1950s and 1960s. New questions are being asked, new theoretical tools are

introduced to address old questions, and new methods have been applied. The book

by Luc Verhey, Phillipp Kiiver and Sandor Loeffen perhaps illuminates an ‘account-

ability turn’ in EU scholarship. This turn contributes to import lessons from domes-

tic governance to our understanding of continuity and change in EU governance, for

example with respect to the relationship between legislative and executive institutions,

as well as the relationship between government institutions and citizens. This review

addresses the main arguments of the book, whilst also making some comments on

each of them.

This book results from a research project on political accountability focusing the

interaction between international, European and national legal systems. As such, this is

mainly a book about law, largely written by legal scholars. Multi-level accountability is

studied from two perspectives throughout this book. The f‌irst is a top-down analysis of

how international and European integration affect national legal and constitutional

orders. The second, a bottom-up analysis on how common principles developed in

different national legal systems, may inf‌luence international and European integration.

The project contains three sub-projects that also organise the book. The f‌irst sub-

project concerns national parliamentary control of EU decision making. The second

sub-project concerns accountability mechanisms in the relationship between govern-

ments and parliaments in EU Member States. The f‌inal sub-project concerns account-

ability in the executive branch of government. The book is organised according to these

sub-projects. In effect, this volume is a conference proceeding and not so much an

analytically and empirically integrated work. This is clearly seen by the lack of ana-

lytical introduction and conclusion of the book, and also an explicit editorial steer on

the separate contributions. For example, the introductory chapter makes no effort to

present a coherent analytical framework for the book as such, but reads more like a

foreword. The second chapter, however, makes a terminological exercise on political

accountability of value for the subsequent chapters. This chapter makes a valuable

contribution to list key elements that accountability entails, and how it relates to

democracy, legitimacy, representation and responsibility.

European Law Journal, Vol. 16, No. 5, September 2010, pp. 685–693.

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA