Europe: A Concise Encyclopedia of the European Union from Aachen to Zollverein

Citation

Gamble, C.J. (1999), "Europe: A Concise Encyclopedia of the European Union from Aachen to Zollverein", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 2, pp. 128-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.99.2.128.4

If you thought that the Multi‐fibre Arrangement (MFA) was a new healthy breakfast cereal, this book reveals that it is a “tariff and quota arrangement between the EU, the USA and developing countries to protect the declining textile industries of the advanced nations against low‐cost imports”.

I enjoyed immensely dipping into this most readable encyclopaedia and unearthing a variety of fascinating facts about the workings of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Union, some of which had remained hidden from me, even though I have had considerable experience of life and work in the Brussels bureaucracy. Grateful thanks are expressed to Rodney Leach for highlighting, inter alia, the often surreptitious use of propaganda by the European Commission, such as in a report in 1993 advocating targeting young people “where resistance is weakest” and women as more “intuitively inclined [...] to recognise the advantages of a better future”. See Leach’s heading “Propaganda” for a fuller account of other practices, including the $75 million campaign approved by the European Parliament in 1998 to promote the euro.

My eye then rested on the heading “Twinning” which particularly interested me as I have been closely involved in forging a twinning link between the English Lakeland town of Coniston and the French town of Illiers‐Combray, a few miles east of Chartres. This twinning is very successful and flourishes thanks to entirely voluntary work by local people on both sides of the Channel, without any outside financial help. A Charter was agreed and signed by the Mayor of Illiers‐Combray and the Chairman of the Coniston and District Council. I am therefore deeply shocked to discover, thanks to Rodney Leach, that “when two towns twin with each other, the European Commission makes cash available for joint projects in return for which it urges the mayors to swear an oath in favour of European unification” and suggests a form of wording (see Leach, p. 195) which is heavily politicised and eerie with overtones of the thought police in George Orwell.

There are “snapshots” of present and potential EU countries and profiles of European political figures, past and present. However, the speed of events is such that Romano Prodi, profiled on p. 158, is no longer the Italian Prime Minister; nor is Helmut Kohl (pp. 129‐30) the German Chancellor. Gerhard Schröder, Kohl’s replacement, is included, but not Prodi’s successor, Massimo D’Alema.

A most informative and lengthy entry deals with EMU (Economic and Monetary Union), and the critical difference between a single and a common currency is particularly well explained. The “Cucumber Directive”, which specifies in some 2,000 words “the permitted length, circumference, arc, curvature and crookedness of cucumbers”, is a useful reminder of the absurdity of so much Eurocracy, as well as being an amusing conversation piece.

This is a fascinating and witty book, clearly written in a language happily free from rigid Eurospeak. I thoroughly recommend it to be placed alongside other dictionaries and encyclopaedias as an essential tool.