2008, Volume 14, N°2 - Centre d'études et de recherches ...

Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen 193
He uses the Danish restrictions on the right to establishment in agriculture as a case
study, which were permitted in the accession negotiations, but overruled by a
judgement of the European Court of Justice in 1974. An even better example for
this kind of strict interpretation of the “acquis” from a later period would be the
ECJ’s decision in the early 1990s that a separate European Economic Area Court
would be illegal under Community law – a decision in fact which the EC and EFTA
country negotiators fully anticipated. They cheekily included the EEA Court in the
treaty for purely domestic political reasons to increase the legitimacy of the
national negotiating position and of the EEA in countries like Switzerland, for
example.
Thus, several of the chapters in this volume offer interesting insights into new
developments in EC politics in the first half of the 1970s, in many cases based on
newly accessible sources, although they are not always as multilateral and as
multi-archival as would be desirable. The book as a whole, like most of its
predecessors with the partial exceptions of the more thematic volumes recently
edited by Antonio Varsori and Gérard Bossuat, has no coherence whatsoever,
however. This is underlined by the almost total absence of any attempt by the editor
to develop an overarching interpretation of any kind in his short introduction. In
this case, however, why does the Liaison Group not publish the best manuscripts as
articles in the Journal of European Integration History, where such coherence
across the articles is not required to the same extent as in the case of books? This in
turn would allow the Liaison Group conferences and book publications to become
fully thematic and discuss important developments in EU history in a diachronic
perspective, over a much longer period of time. Such an approach would at least
potentially result in very much more coherent and challenging books, with
collective agendas. Such coherence also appears to be an indispensable
precondition for having a much greater impact on the scholarly community of
historians of modern Europe and interested social scientists. Although no study
appears to exist, it would seem that the Liaison Group books and individual
chapters hardly ever get cited even by historians of the EU, who prefer to refer to
research monographs, other more coherent edited books, journal articles and even
PhD theses, let alone by other historians who totally ignore them. Unfortunately,
they have good reasons for doing so, not because the book chapters are disastrously
bad (although some invariably are), but because the books in their entirety do not
make any coherent statement of any kind. They merely continue to plough through
the vast fields with a monotonous intellectual silence, but reliably following the
opening of the government archives.
Wolfram Kaiser
University of Portsmouth