The European Court's Political Power: Selected Essays by Karen Alter
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00814-5.x |
| Published date | 01 July 2010 |
| Date | 01 July 2010 |
| Author | Marie‐Pierre Granger |
chapters togethera nd making sense of the whole, and I bene¢ted from re-reading
it as I reached the end of the book. The second criticism I have is perhaps not so
much a criticism as a point of disagreementwith the author.This arises in connec-
tion with Bogg’s central argument in favour of an approach to trade union recog-
nition and collective employment relations informed by civic republicanism and
deliberative democracy. Certainly, there is much to agree with here: that more
could be done, in the1999 legislation, to ensure a fair balloting process; that grant-
ing recognition in accordance with workers’ individually expressed preferences is
anyway problematic, given the prevalence of ‘adaptive preferences’. Ultimately,
however, I was not wholly convinced by deliberative democracy as a paradigm
for collective bargaining. The picture Bogg paints is of workers and employers
alike‘enjoined’(252),ascitizens, to‘deliberate together i n a quest for consensus o n
the commongood.This involves shared dialogue, with citizens committed to the
public exchange of reasons that di¡erently situated citizens could reasonable
accept.’ (246) The obvious objection, here, is that managers do not bargain as citi-
zens but as the agents of capital. As Bogg himself puts it, ‘it is unrealistic . . . to
expect interest groups such as trade unions or employers’ associations to behave as
impartial deliberators’ (250). For Bogg, this is an objection which can be rebutted.
Making the case for the importance of a right to strike for the deliberative democ-
racy conception of collective bargaining, he states:‘With the right to strike, deter-
rent-based incentives for genuine deliberation based on reciprocity arecreated, for
employers are faced with the potential of serious economic harm if they are
exposed as manipulating the deliberative process in bad faith.’ (255) It remained
unclear to me, however, why the threat of industrial action should motivate man-
agement to engage in a collective, deliberative quest to identify and further the
common good, rather tha n in a struggle nonetheless to secure its own aims.
It is, perhaps, a testament to the richness of Bogg’s argument that it provoked
points of disagreement as well as agreement. For its analysis of the1999 recogni-
tion procedure alone I found the book valuable indeed. Over and above that, it
provided an interesting and t houghtful perspective on New Labour’s policy in the
¢eld of collective employment relations, anchored in a discussion of political the-
ory and comparative and historical analysis. As such, it joins Paul Davies and
Mark Freedland’s excellent Towards a Flexible Labour Market (OUP, 2007),and Tonia
Novitz and Paul Skidmore’s Fair ness at Work (Hart, 2001), as an important com-
ment on the labour legislation and policyof the Blair and Brown Governments.
Ruth Dukes
n
Karen Alter, The European Court’s Political Power: Selected Essays,Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009,332 pp, hb d40.00.
As the number of ‘new style international courts’ (263), endowed with compul-
sory jurisdiction, and strong enforcement mechanisms, and allowing individual
n
School of Law,University of Glasgow.
Reviews
693
r2010The Authors. Journal Compilation r2010The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2010)73(4) 679^696
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