Reviews for The European Union and the Member States

The average rating for The European Union and the Member States based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-15 00:00:00 Mitchell Blount The French have an international reputation as revolutionaries, rebels and rioters. But as philosopher Alain Badiou points out in The Meaning of Sarkozy, the everyday reality is a different story. "France is also a deeply conservative country, which responds to the revolutionary episodes in its history with long sequences of black reaction," he says. "Those who have come to power in these painful sequences have never lacked the support of numerous and well-established intellectual cliques." It is for this reason, says Badiou, that France has one of its most conservative leaders yet, in Nicolas Sarkozy. He celebrated his election as president in 2007 by dining at Paris restaurant Fouquet's - traditionally the after-party location for France's equivalent of the Oscars - and then holidaying in Malta on a billionaire friend's yacht. The message, says Badiou, was: "The Left no longer scares anyone. Up with the rich, down with the poor." Sarkozy was a mayor of a town where hereditary wealth is concentrated among "dominant and privileged people who sense that their privileges are conditional and under threat and that their domination is perhaps only provisional and already shaky". He has played upon such concerns by stoking fears "of foreigners, of workers, of the people, of youngsters from the banlieues [slums], Muslims, black Africans... This fear, conservative and gloomy, creates the desire for a master who will protect you, even if only while oppressing and impoverishing you all the more." Badiou likens Sarkozy to a twitchy cop, a middle management banker or an accountant. He is a "minuscule character in direct communication with the lowest form of opinion polls", whose slavery to consensus has led him to declare pedophilia a genetic defect and himself a born heterosexual. His persecution of pedophiles is strange, suggests Badiou, when considering Sarkozy married someone far younger than himself - professional model Carla Bruni. Once elected, "Sarkozy hammered home the point that he was now president of us all". But Sarkozy's vision divides the world, setting the powerful against the persecuted, says Badiou. Where once the walls divided east from west, they now divide the global north and south. If globalisation and the international community were a reality rather than just neoliberal buzzwords, foreigners would have to be welcomed everywhere, he says. Instead, "the state authorities and their blind followers will keep tabs on them, ban them from staying, mercilessly criticise their customs, their way of dressing, their family or religious practices". The parallels with Australia are obvious. Ironically, the divide is painted as "a purely moral opposition between despotic and cruel states and states based on law - without of course explaining the origin of the gigantic massacres committed on a planetary scale for a century and a half by these 'lawful' states... "The final dialectic is that of fear and terror. A state legitimised by fear is virtually fit to become terroristic... "Democratic forms are being found for a state terror at the level of contemporary technology: radar, photos, internet controls, systematic bugging of all telephones, mapping of people's movements. The perspective of the state that we face is one of virtual terror, its key mechanism being surveillance, and increasingly also informing... "The technological means for controlling the population are already such that Stalin, with his endless handwritten files, his mass executions, his spies with hats, his gigantic lice-ridden camps and bestial tortures, appears like an amateur from another age." Badiou cites Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek as saying that what was not understood, when Stalinism and parliamentary democracy were counterposed to one another, was that Stalinism was the future of parliamentary democracy. Elections now do nothing but impose the established order, the so-called Left are generally socially polite capitalists, and the government would be little different if chosen by lottery. "The French revolutionaries, who were republicans and not democrats, termed 'corruption' the subjection of governmental power to business matters." In this sense, Sarkozy has brought corruption out into the open, says Badiou. So what is the answer? For a start, it is alternative media. "A newspaper that belongs to rich managers does not have to be read by someone who is neither a manager nor rich," says Badiou. "Just look at what these newspapers, as well as the most popular television channels, really are. They belong to the king of concrete, the prince of luxury products, the emperor of military aircraft, the magnate of celebrity magazines, the water millionaire... In other words, to all those people who, on their yachts or their estates, take little Sarkozy, who has done so well, on their hospitable knees. How can we accept this state of affairs? Why should the broad mass of people be at the mercy of the price of concrete mixers or the world market for ostrich skin, when it comes to getting information? Stop reading those papers. Look at sources that originate elsewhere than in the dominant commercial circuits. Let the ultra-rich newspaper proprietors talk to themselves. Let us withdraw our interest from the interests that their self-interest wants to make ours." The answer also lies in what Badiou calls psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's "cure": "to raise impotence to impossibility" through "courage". In other words, to be idealistic and never be discouraged from being so. Vive la revolution.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-27 00:00:00 Tiffany Moore My only complaint about this book is against its title. What sounds like a dry, inside-baseball exploration of French politics (of a now deposed President, no less) is in fact an impassioned, inspiring, challenging call to action for all of us who dream of a better world (but who realize it will take hard thinking and hard work to bring it about). Badiou highlights so many of the outrageous facts and unquestioned assumptions of the current "world" "order", it's hard to know where to begin. So just go ahead and begin at page one of this wonderful text, and don't bother stopping until you've arrived, changed, at page 117.