Contenu du sommaire : Subsidiarité et fonctionnement de l'Union européenne

Discourse and Practice of Subsidiarity in the European Union since the Maastricht Treaty
The principle of subsidiarity is less a formal rule to be applied than a resource, among numerous others – discursive and practical – at the disposal of the European Union's members. In its Maastricht formulation, the syntagm mainly allowed the reconciliation of the irreconcilable at the heart of European functionalism: distributing competences not as a result of the legally covered subjects, but as a consequence of politically set imperatives. Nonetheless, since the Maastricht Treaty, numerous conflicts of interpretation have successively opposed or bound together the Commission, the governments of member states, the Court of Justice, and national parliaments. Thus, the absence of a clear definition of the principle of subsidiarity has led to an enrichment of the resource's potential.

The Role of Parliaments in the Functioning of the European Union. When Subsidiarity Reinforces Democratization of the Union. The Treaty of Lisbon confirms the principle of subsidiarity as a corner-stone of the European Community system. A protocol sums up the applications of this principle. Another one specifies the role of the national parliaments in the Community's decision-making process and the parliaments' role in the subsidiarity and democratization of the European space. The development of the European Parliament's prerogatives is the other part of the reinforcement of the association of European populations in the democratization and community building in the EU. National parliaments could concern themselves more with European matters and the strengthened European Parliament is likely to garner more interest on the part of the EU citizens.

European Integration by Means of “Jurisdictional Subsidiarity”?
Jurisdictional subsidiarity, which was introduced into the European Community at its inception, entrusts the national judges with the proper application of European law in the member states. This article deals with the role of subsidiarity in European integration. We can observe that the jurisdictional subsidiarity, far from being an obstacle to this integration, is, in fact, favorable to its evolution. Some examples of national jurisprudence show the paradoxes in the national judges' position, as well as the evolution of their role over time. In the end, it appears that the national and European judges have overcome most of their initial opposition, have reached a compromise, and tend to share common goals: the “war of the judges” is being replaced by a “Europe of the judges.”

The Principle of Subsidiarity and its Impact on EU Environmental Law and Policy
Since environmental policy is not vested exclusively in the EU, the principle of subsidiarity applies. It comes much more to the fore in the environmental field than in other policies such as the internal market. Indeed, environment policy entails constant cooperation between all institutional players. What is more, there are a number of good reasons supporting the view that EU environmental measures easily pass the hurdles of subsidiarity, including the member states' inability to solve environmental issues of a cross-border nature, such as ozone depletion and climate change. The horizontal dimension of the principle of subsidiarity must also be emphasized: as far as environmental issues are concerned, self-regulation and deregulation have been promoted thanks to the rhetoric of subsidiarity.

The “Black Box” Paradox. Hospital Reforms and Organization
For several decades French hospitals have undergone an unceasing flow of reforms to make them more efficient; these reforms are characterized by the increasing introduction of concepts and tools stemming from contemporary economics. Does the hospital change? The picture is nuanced. The philosophy of the reforms, based on the theory of incentives, allows the regulator to avoid involvement in a very complex organization. Although the principle is sensible, we assume that these tools do not help the stakeholders within the hospital to be guided in a reconfiguration of their organization.

Testing Dialectical Rationality on Water Governance: Lessons and Illustrations
After deconstructing the rationale underpinning the social engineering models for water management, and demonstrating their limitations, we propose an analysis based on the idea of “dialectical rationality.” Our aim is to develop a strategic toolkit for a necessary shift in the focus of concepts that has become increasingly problematic and, more precisely, to gain a new grasp of the complexity, diversity and politics at stake in water governance, while all these notions have been sidelined by the “economic dogma” of the World Bank. We demonstrate that this shift in conceptual focus opens the way for a reappraisal of the role of government, presenting it as the “initiator” of a partnership between the many stakeholders in water management at a territorial level.

Revealing One's Private Life on Social Networks: Significant Changes
The development of social networking sites has generated significant changes. Indeed, the act of revealing one's private life in a public medium represents a new behavior, heretofore reserved for only public or famous personalities. Now, each one of us can become a public persona and create certain notoriety, even if it is limited only to the Internet. However, these new behaviors produce negative effects that legislators, Canadian and French, have had to take into account, in order to protect users from social networking sites that sometimes demonstrate clear negligence.

Objective Ugliness and Subjective Beauty of the Body in French Law
The state exercises its power over people and their bodies using the law as its instrument for the normalization and homogenization of the social body. Also, there is a legal normalization of bodies. The law develops an implicit standard of ugliness: the state will not say a person is ugly, but the national health insurance system will pay for plastic surgery if one's ugliness is judged excessive. So, for the administration, the ugliness is classified a pathology. Additionally, the European Court for Human Rights proclaims the right to the free development of personality. This right includes the right to use your body as you want, to transform it into beauty, contingent upon your estimation of beauty. Thus, the beauty is subjectivized. The body becomes a personal creation subject to the exercise of one's rights. Does the body artist thus enjoy artistic rights to his body artwork?