Naissance du peuple européen – By Florence Chaltiel

• Published date: 01 January 2009
• Author: Jan Klabbers
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2008.00454_1.x
• Date: 01 January 2009

BOOK REVIEWS

Naissance du peuple européen. By Florence Chaltiel. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006. 226pp.

Pb. €24,50.

The history of European integration has, since its inception in the 1950s, always been

characterised by enthusiastic advocacy, more so than enthusiastic opposition. Time

and again, Europhiles feel the need to extol the EU’s virtues, to point out that without

it, Europe would be a worse place to live, would probably be divided by wars hot and

cold alike, and would no longer be a force to be reckoned with. Chaltiel’s book f‌its this

picture, and does so at the more extreme end of enthusiasm. Chaltiel’s mission is to

convince the French of the folly of their ways when they rejected, en masse, the draft

Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, in May 2005. For Chaltiel, the main

reason why the French (and perhaps by extension the Dutch, although this is not made

explicit) rejected the draft constitution, was fear: fear for unemployment; fear for riots

in the housing projects of Paris; fear for the invasion of Polish plumbers; fear for, well,

pretty much everything. Europe—so her thesis seems to be—was unjustly blamed for

most of this, so someone must set the record straight and justify the existence of the EC.

Chaltiel’s premise is not beyond debate. Europe does not need defending anymore;

few people would dream of getting rid of the EU. Indeed, with a keen eye for ambiguity,

she herself, when discussing future scenarios, omits the possibility of terminating the EU.

In most Member States, those who really want out are to be found on the fringes of local

politics: in Finland, the only party advocating withdrawal are the ‘Perussuomalaiset’

(this roughly translates as ‘Basic Finns’), whose most popular f‌igure is a colourful formal

professional boxer. In short, resistance against the EU is limited to those who are not

taken all that seriously (such votes as are attracted are typically protest votes), and the

same picture emerges, as far as I can tell, in all Member States. Hence, there is no need

for Europe to be defensive: its existence is about as guaranteed as can be, in much the

same way that everyone takes for granted that, say, Canada exists, or Bolivia.

If that is really the case, then Chaltiel is f‌ighting windmills, not unlike that great

European of yesteryear, Don Quixote. The problem with Europe is not that it is

misunderstood; the problem is rather that the European project is understood all too

well. Part of the problem with the Constitutional Treaty was, after all, precisely that it

was not a constitution. It was neither a constitution in form (in form it was still a treaty)

but, more importantly, nor was it a constitution in contents.1Instead, the Constitu-

tional Treaty read like a political manifesto, outlining a socio-economic programme

and, to some extent, carving it in stone. Certainly, it did contain a few of the things one

has come to expect from a post-war constitution: an enumeration of organs; established

the relations between those organs; and a catalogue of basic rights (albeit of highly

ambivalent legal status). But it also contained lots and lots of things that have little or

no place in a constitution: from detailed rules on the behaviour of companies to precise

rules on state conduct in commerce and the outlines of policies on a number of other

1For a brief comment, see J. Klabbers and P. Leino, ‘Death by Constitution? The Draft Treaty Establishing

a Constitution for Europe’, (2003) 4 German Law Journal 1293.

European Law Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 142–150.

© 2009 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA