Book Review: Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policymaking
Abstract
336 International Review of Administrative Sciences years when the European Community's exercise of its own powers is at issue. The Maastricht Treaty, as is well known, explicitly enshrines the principle of subsidiarity for the first time ever in an instrument of 'constitutional' import. It is a considerable surprise, therefore, to find Chantal Millon-Delsol in the final pages of her book dealing precisely with the emergence of the principle in the European debate, referring to Jacques Delors as a socialist rather than a social Christian. The intellectual origins of the President of the European Commission, in fact, far more than his recent adherence to the Socialist Party, predisposed him to be receptive to the principle which has illuminated the discussion of German federalism since the early post-war years; by his own account, indeed, it was the prime ministers of the German Linder who first drew the Commission President's attention to the existence and utility of the subsidiarity principle. The seductiveness of the principle, with all its clarity and ambiguities, is clear to see for the many politicians still searching for 'another way' between social- ism and liberalism. While this book clearly shows how the principle, even embodied in a