Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Myth and geopolitics of the Rhineland frontier
- 2 Trans Rhenum incolunt: the inauguration of the Rhineland frontier
- 3 A “principality of priests”: the inauguration of Europe
- 4 Anonymity and prosperity
- 5 The great antecedent cracking
- 6 Coups de force: Ossian and the département
- 7 Wacht am Rhein: the Ossianic fracture of Rhineland space
- 8 Carolingian discourse and Rhineland pacification
- 9 Spatial representation and the political imagination
- Index
9 - Spatial representation and the political imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Myth and geopolitics of the Rhineland frontier
- 2 Trans Rhenum incolunt: the inauguration of the Rhineland frontier
- 3 A “principality of priests”: the inauguration of Europe
- 4 Anonymity and prosperity
- 5 The great antecedent cracking
- 6 Coups de force: Ossian and the département
- 7 Wacht am Rhein: the Ossianic fracture of Rhineland space
- 8 Carolingian discourse and Rhineland pacification
- 9 Spatial representation and the political imagination
- Index
Summary
In 1988, Jacques Delors, in a speech before the European Parliament, urged member states to “wake up” to the fact that much of their policy-making powers had been transferred to the European Union. In 1990 he declared it his objective
that before the end of the Millennium [Europe] should have a true federation. [The Commission should become] a political executive which can define essential common interest … responsible before the European Parliament and before the nation-states represented how you will, by the European Council or by a second chamber of national parliaments.
The goal was unmet, but not quixotic. Craig Parsons has shown how the “accumulation of community initiatives” recasts the institutional and discursive framework of European politics such that ideas that were once subject to heated debate now locate normal political deliberation. Because so many aspects of national policy have become the province of Brussels, the Union already looks and acts more like a kind of federal entity than it does an “international organization.” Not only do (most) EU countries share a single policy in trade, agriculture, money, and market regulation, but institutionally the Single European Act and the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam deprive member states of much of their power to oppose policies supported by a majority of members, and deny the Council, where state interests are represented, the power to pass (certain kinds of) legislation without the explicit approval of the European Parliament.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- European Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier , pp. 300 - 330Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008