(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
| Summer 2002 |
|
Issue 43 | |
|
| |||||||
The European Union: a critical guide
Steven P. McGiffen
London: Pluto, 2002, £11.99 (pb), £35 (hb)
Tom Easton
Discussion about the European Union, just like that on its forebears - the European Economic Community and the European Community - has often been short on fact and long on opinion. Dialogues of the deaf have frequently resulted, with caricature images of 'Little Englanders' and 'Euromaniacs' vying for support from an increasingly disengaged public.
Author Steven McGiffen knows all this about the EU having worked in it for 16 years. He writes 'as an Englishman who lives in Belgium and works for an international organisation representing a Dutch political party on the secretariat of the United Left Group in the European Parliament'.
So this critical guide to the EU is an attempt to explain how the EU really works from the euro and CAP to qualified majority voting and foreign policy. It draws both on experience and on research from an impressively wide range of sources.
McGiffen has produced what seems a balanced account of EU activities, one which will prove useful to both supporters and opponents of the federalist project in the coming euro referendum. But this descriptive even-handedness doesn't stop him having his own opinions on those activities and the structures which run them.
He concludes:
'I have seen nothing to disabuse me of the view that the integrationist project serves only one agenda - that of the multinational corporations whose growing hegemony of power at all levels threatens everything that has been gained by people in developed countries over the last two centuries: democratic rights and freedoms, economic security, the chance to live a dignified, pr0ductive, fulfilling life.'The previous British referendum on 'Europe' was scarcely a balanced affair. Most of the press promoted the 'Yes' campaign, as did much of the political establishment, the CIA, the BBC and the Information Research Department. This time the forces are less uneven and McGiffen's material could help lay the basis for a more serious debate. Whether we get one, of course, is another matter entirely.
Last | Contents | Next
