By Oliver Garner
The 21st century has already provided a quarter-century of tumult for democracy. The last year of these first 25 years has been no exception.
Both the world’s largest and its most prominent democracy returned ‘strongmen’ leaders. By contrast in Central-Eastern Europe an anti-populist coalition toppled a traditionalist government.
As War rages in Western Eurasia and the Northern Middle-East, signifying the collapse of deliberative ordering of human affairs, natural disasters push societies to their breaking point, regardless of the level of their development.
The Rule of Law seeks to impose order upon such tumult, as democracy seeks to provide humans with the means to decide upon their own destiny.
Here are five books on this phenomenon that have been covered by and informed the RevDem Rule of Law section in 2024.
Number 1: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Penguin, Allen Lane imprint. Published: 27/07/2024. ISBN: 9780241627891. 240 pages. £20.00
Anne Applebaum built her reputation for fearless and favourless scholarship in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall. But, today, “The End of History” has ended, and has been replaced by “The End of Naivety”. A quarter of a century after the Cold War, the world’s conflict remains hot. Applebaum thus turns her attention to those who have sought to fill the vacuum left by Marxist technocracy with a revanchist volta back to a pre-modern, and potentially pre-medieval, form of hierarchical governance.
Applebaum’s appropriation of the language of corporatism in the title is provocative and goes beyond mere symbolism through her appraisal of the financial interests of the “dictators” whom she claims desire to run the world. Those aware of the material dynamics of power in relation to goods flow between South and North America, and then the world, may respond:”T’was ever thus”; “The World is (and was) Theirs.“.
What remains unspoken, however, are the darker legacies of those bodies and (legal) persons who do bear monikers such as “Inc,” and “PLC”, and who may be regarded already to have converted any preference to “run the world” into the reality, and – most crucially – whose legacies may be traced back to that most nakedly central case of dictatorship from the last century.
Number 2: Paul Linden-Retek, Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in European Law series. Published: 13 April 2023. ISBN: 9780192899187. 352 pages. £90.00.
Law is an arcane and complex field of human practice and study. The Law of the European Union takes this complexity and multiplies it by its square root. Treaties on European Union and Functioning of the European Union contain provisions and clauses – words – that have the utmost significance for European humanity and beyond in the dry nomenclature of numeracy. Councils – European, of the European Union/Ministers, and even ‘of Europe’ – lying in Strasbourg, entirely outside the order that is maintained in Brussels, except for sporadic visit by the ‘Parliament’ of the former – abound.
But, make no mistake, the words produced, conveyed, applied, and interpreted by these European institutions impact upon (nearly) every single aspect of the lives of those human beings who find themselves the ‘juridical objects’ (and, at least in normative aspirational and prescriptive theory, the ‘democratic subjects’) of EU law.
Paul Linden-Retek’s monograph does not shy away from the complexity of this Union of Supranational Sovereign Republics (and Constitutional Monarchies); indeed, his prose and the reviews thereof produced on our platform only add further layers of diffusion (but hopefully not confusion).
But, if the reader persists in unravelling this transnational, transatlantic, Mitteleuropean “riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma” then they will be greatly rewarded in terms of knowledge. The time that it will take them to acquire this learning, however, cannot be reimbursed.
Number 3: Martijn van den Brink, Legislative Authority and Interpretation in the European Union. Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in European Law series. Published: 16 July 2024. ISBN: 9780198900085. 272 pages. £90.00
Law is complex, as mentioned supra. It need not be. If one works hard to cut through the layers of rhetorical fabric that have been draped upon its flesh and bones, it all boils down to something so simple that even human infants can use it. Language.
Plain language can be understood. Less plain language needs to be interpreted. The results of both understanding and interpretation of language in the law of the European Union has consequences (see supra).
Martijn van den Brink is a scholar who has a keen sense of how to engage in intellectual dissection. The results of this work are a book that is easy on the eye and mind, and rich in its rewards.
N.B. An oral conversation upon the topic of a book will never fully replicate the value of the original written word. But it may be a useful supplement thereto. Listen here for the RevDem podcast interview between Oliver Garner and Martijn van den Brink, recorded on 30 October 2024.
Number 4: Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism. Polity press. Published: February 2022. ISBN: 978-1-509-54887-3. £55.00 (hardback), £14.00 (paperback).
Natural resources flowed, and continue to flow albeit less freely, West from Eurasia into the Western European Union. Material disruption and human devastation has arisen from the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 24 February 2022 until the present day. Disintegration (in same cases in a materially literal sense) continues pace.
An alternative immaterial pipeline has been established, with its intellectual resources flowing West from Notre Dame and Oxford, before being processed in Central Europe, and then being redirected back West to its eventual end-users on the Eastern Seaboard and beyond.
Common Good Constitutionalism is a concept the time of which not only its author and his supporters believe has come. Those who hold highest judicial office in Supreme Courts both US and UK cite its precepts. Time will tell how truly ‘Common’ the ‘Good’ that it professes to endorse will prove to be during the current term of the Highest Office that the Western World (currently) offers.
A regime that was rooted in the spiritually and conceptually ‘Catholic’ to a totalising extent was already constructed, and emphatically deconstructed, in the Western World between World War II and 1973. One can only hope that any rebirth thereof leads to less shedding of that most precious of human resources.
Number 5: The next monograph that seeks to understand the reflexive effects of the Rule of Law and democracy for humanity. Watch the RevDem Book Review section closely as we seek to discover and cover such a book in the next 12 months.
