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“It's the Politics, Stupid.” Or is Reality more Complex?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Maria Weimer
Maria Weimer*
Affiliation:
Department for International andEuropean Law of Maastricht University, The Netherlands, E–mail:
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Extract

Reality is complex, and often does not lend itself to generalization or simplifying explanations. Yet at the same time, explaining reality often requires the shaping of notions and concepts of it through generalization and the reduction of complexity. This tension between complexity and particularity on the one hand and generalization and the search for abstracting explanatory patterns on the other is beautifully illustrated by two recently released publications on precaution and risk regulation in the United States and Europe, namely “The Politics of Precaution” by David Vogel1 and “The Reality of Precaution” edited by Jonathan Wiener, Michael Rogers, James Hammitt, and Peter Sand.

Both books together can be seen as the latest significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of the precautionary principle in risk regulation in a comparative EU-US perspective. Both contributions are significant in that they consolidate the trend towards an empirically informed analysis of the actual practice of the application of precaution in risk regulation.

Type
Book Reviews
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 297 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 Vogel, David, The Politics of Precaution, Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wiener, Jonathan B., Rogers, Michael D., Hammitt, James K., and Sand, Peter H. (eds) The Reality of Precaution, Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (Washington DC, London: RFF Press, 2011).Google Scholar

2 See on this term Fritz Scharpf, “Problem-solving Effectiveness and Democratic Accountability in the EU” Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies Working Paper 03/1, February 2003 available at <http://www.mpifg.de/pu/workpap/wp03-1/wp03-1.html>.

3 See Majone, Giandomenico, “The rise of Statutory Regulation in Europe” in idem (ed) Regulating Europe (Ney York: Routledge, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 This remains largely unchanged until today, see Joseph H.H. Weiler, “Democracy Without the People: the Extinction of European Legitimacy,” paper presented at the Dahrendorf Workshop on “How to Democratize the European Union?” at Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, November 2012 (on file with author).

5 See Majone, Giandomenico, Europe as the Would-be World Power, The EU at Fifty, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 22 ff..

6 See ibid..

7 See Haltje, Armin, ‘The Economic Constitution within the Internal Market’, and Josef Drexl ‘Competition Law as Part of the European Constitution’, both in Armin von Bogdandy and Jürgen Bast (eds), Principles of European Constitutional Law(Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2010) 589–629 and 659–679 respectively.Google Scholar

8 See Andreas Grimmel, ‘Integration in the Context of law: Why the European Court of Justice is not a political actor’, Les Cahiers Europeens des Sciences Po. N. 03/2011, 10.

9 E.g. Zander, Joakim, The Application of the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 See David Vogel, Ships Passing in the Night: The Changing Politics of Risk Regulation in Europe and the United States. European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Working Paper 16/2001; and Jonathan B. Wiener, Whose Precaution After All? A Comment on the Comparison and Evolution of Risk Regulatory Systems, 13 (2003) Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law, pp. 207–262.

11 See e.g. Sunstein, Cass R., Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar