Jack Hayward

Parliament and the French Government's Domination of the Legislative Process

The Fifth Republic sought to overcome the previously excessive subordination of government to parliament by constitutionally imposed procedural rules in the anticipated absence of stable parliamentary majorities. Despite their existence, governments have used the package vote, control over amendments and the rules governing oral and written questions to ministers to avoid parliament enforcing ministerial accountability. The governments stringent control of the budgetary process has led to the ambitious 2001 procedural reassertion of National Assembly financial control, which is gradually coming into operation by 2006. Parliament has been playing an increasing role in European Union legislation.

Review: Michael Sutton, France and the Construction of Europe, 1944—2007. The Geopolitical Imperative, Berghahn Books: New York and Oxford, 2007; 336 pp.; 9781845453930,

At key points throughout the book, Sonenscher is also able to show how these mainly French ideas reached out and mingled with writing in the Englishand German-speaking worlds. What he is not able to do – and nor is it clear that he is concerned to – is to tie debate between a variety of thinkers, both famous and obscure, to any concrete socio-political influence. This is the primary reason why this book may not attract a wider readership beyond those directly interested in the intellectual twists and turns it documents – the author is resolutely determined not to insist on why any of it matters. At one level, this can only be admirable, and it must be observed that this is more a case of reporting the ineffable complexity, and potential real irrelevance, of so-called great thoughts, than it is of merely scorning the effort to explain. Sonenscher seems genuinely unsure of how all this might be made resonant in the day-to-day world of political initiative or economic exchange. This reviewer is willing to allow that he may be missing something, for Sonenscher writes sentences and paragraphs (and sometimes sentences indistinguishable from paragraphs) which require one to hold at least six different things in one’s head at once to have a hope of following their meaning. It is, however, good in this age of sweeping claims for significant revelation to encounter a book showing you so much you didn’t know, and only suggesting, rather than demanding, that it change everything you thought you knew.

85.00/£42.50 (hbk)

Sartori, G. (2005) Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Colchester: ECPR Press. Parry, G. (2005) Political Elites. Colchester: ECPR Press. Lukes, S. (2006) Individualism. Colchester: ECPR Press. Kaplan, M. A. (2005) System and Process in International Politics. Colchester: ECPR Press.

The ECPR Venture into Retrieval

To understand the place of this book within the trajectory of Pierre Rosanvallon’s intellectual odyssey, one needs briefly to consider where he is coming from. Starting out as an economic expert in the de-confessionalized CFDT trade union movement, which in the 1960s made such imaginative contributions to French economic and social thinking, Rosanvallon switched from economic analysis to the history of political ideas in the 1980s, having become convinced of the exhaustion of the social democratic model’s capacity to deal with the challenge of neo-liberalism to the welfare state. The clues to his rejection of both social statism and market liberalism in favour of social liberalism came at the end of two books from the early 1980s. In La Crise de l’État providence (1981, revised edn 1984, p. 136) he wrote of defining a: