The European Union and China. Decision‐Making in the EU Foreign and Security Policy towards the People's Republic of China – By May‐Britt Stumbaum

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2010.00535_4.x
• Date: 01 November 2010
• Author: Jing Men
• Published date: 01 November 2010

eulj_535831..841

BOOK REVIEWS

Die Selbstautorisierung des Agenten. Der Europäische Gerichtshof im Vergleich zum US

Supreme Court.By Marcus Höreth. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2008. 418 pp. Pb. €69.00.

It does not take the reader long to f‌igure out that there are two main goals that Markus

Höreth’s Die Selbstautorisierung des Agenten (Die Selbstautorisierung) pursues. First, it

aims to prove that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) can be understood very well by

means of comparison with some functional equivalent, in this case, the US Supreme

Court. Second, it attempts to illustrate that the most relevant development in the

Euro-law game can be explained as the action of principals and agents that are

enmeshed—if not trapped—in a complex constellation of institutions and decision-

making rules.

Höreth’s theoretical framework is well explained. In addition, all epistemic develop-

ment that shaped the neofunctionalist-intergovernmentalist debate in the late 1980s are

thoroughly narrated and meaningfully connected. Generally, German monographs

conceived as a Habilitation aim at producing comprehensive and profound analytical

material. Therefore, commending a scholar’s work as being pedagogic is not what he or

she would necessarily love to read in a review. But in this case it is different; different

because the task is markedly interdisciplinary. One can immediately identify the enor-

mous challenge that is to address two different audiences. Höreth’s is a f‌ine example of

how to guide legal scholars successfully into political theories of European

integration—which featured mainly American political scientists—without necessarily

raising scepticism on the side of legal academia.

In regard to the political scientists’ narrative about how the ECJ challenged Member

States by means of preliminary rulings and expansive interpretation of EC law, one

could easily get the impression that everything has been said by now. However, Die

Selbstautorisierung might possibly prove that the comparative perspective can certainly

make a contribution of its own, by multiplying the number of empirical observations.

In this regard, the mere question whether the ECJ can be compared with anything else

is a valid exercise of its own. Nevertheless, it brings considerable perils with it, such as,

for instance, the challenge of different contexts. Höreth successfully overcomes this

problem by letting functional criteria guide most of the research; in this case, principal–

agent (P–A) theories provide all the assumptions and analytical tools that are necessary

for the book’s argument. The assumption in Die Selbstautorisierung is that all political

actors that engage in international or interstate cooperation face incentives to establish

dispute-settlement bodies, in other words, agents. Furthermore, the P–A framework

assumes that an agent’s behaviour is highly dependent upon the link with the principal.

The narrative of the empowerment of both the ECJ and the US Supreme Court f‌it this

frame. At this point comes the book’s central argument: in terms of the P–A theory, the

chances of the agent becoming a principal of its own (and appoint its own sub-national

agents) is contingent on the degree to which the principal is able to react to the agent’s

‘self-authorisation’. Indeed, the comparison with the US Supreme Court shows that the

European principals—the Member States—operate in a decision-making web far too

dense in order to react to the machinations of its agent. This argument is convincing.

European Law Journal, Vol. 16, No. 6, November 2010, pp. 831–841.

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

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA