Citizen participation and the Lisbon Treaty : A legal perspective

How to "bring the [European] Union closer to its citizens" is a vexed and vital problem of European integration. Article 11 TEU on participatory democracy, recently introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, is meant to be part of the solution. The EU Economic and Social Committee has gone so far as to define this provision "a milestone on the road to a people's Europe that is real and feasible". This appears to be an overly optimistic assessment - partly because art. 11 relies heavily on the involvement of civil society organisations, which political science literature suggests is conceptually and/or practically irrelevant to citizen involvement; partly because it largely formalizes participatory practices that have been in existence for years without cognizable effects on citizen participation; and partly because even its most innovative element - the European citizens' initiative (ECI) - does not bring significant changes to the Union's constitutional arrangements in terms of redistributing decision-making power. In addition to that, secondary legislation places significant hurdles on the submission of ECIs and might prevent or delay their becoming a standard democratic practice. This is not to say that art. 11 TEU has no potential at all. Its insertion in the Treaty might provide impetus to rethink and develop past participatory practices, such as horizontal civil dialogue. Moreover, the effects of "popular input" in the form of ECIs on EU institutional dynamics is as yet unknown - and perhaps not negligible, to judge from the keen interest that the European Parliament and other bodies have demonstrated in "appropriating" it as a political asset. Finally, art. 11 raises the stakes of the Union's democratic challenge and might pressure EU institutions to make full use of its potential. Or, if eventually proved inadequate, art. 11 might constitute a constitutional experiment on the way to meaningful forms of direct democracy at EU level

La 'saga Metock', ou des inconvénients du pragmatisme helvétique dans la gestion des rapports entre droit européen, droit bilatéral et droit interne

«Sélective» et «statique» en théorie, la reprise de l'acquis de l'Union européenne dans le cadre de la voie bilatérale n'en donne pas moins lieu à une dynamique évolutive et expansive, exigeant un travail constant de coordination entre le droit européen, le droit bilatéral et le droit interne. Appelés à gérer ce travail de coordination, le juge et le législateur fédéraux ont traditionnellement opté pour un suivi «au cas par cas» de l'acquis, propre à préserver leur marge de manoeuvre ou à tout le moins l'image qu'il est politiquement convenable d'en donner. Cette approche pragmatique est toutefois inapte à maîtriser les dynamiques de la voie bilatérale. Elle est par ailleurs dommageable pour la cohérence de l'ordre juridique suisse tout comme pour sa lisibilité et prévisibilité, comportant de surcroît un risque accru de courts-circuits entre droit et politique. Les vicissitudes du régime du regroupement familial en Suisse, sous l'impulsion de la jurisprudence de la Cour de justice de l'Union européenne et notamment de l'arrêt Metock de 2007, fournissent une illustration exemplaire de ces propos. En retraçant les étapes de cette saga politico-judiciaire, le présent article met en exergue les choix stratégiques effectués par les autorités fédérales et, surtout, l'évolution de leur approche à l'égard du «suivi» du droit européen - évolution dont l'ATF 136 II 5, qui énonce la «nouvelle doctrine» du Tribunal fédéral en la matière, représente à ce jour l'aboutissement

More loosely bound hadron molecules at CDF?

In a recent paper we have proposed a method to estimate the prompt production cross section of X(3872) at the Tevatron assuming that this particle is a loosely bound molecule of a D and a D*bar meson. Under this hypothesis we find that it is impossible to explain the high prompt production cross section found by CDF at sigma(X(3872)) \sim 30-70 nb as our theoretical prediction is about 300 times smaller than the measured one. Following our work, Artoisenet and Braaten, have suggested that final state interactions in the DD*bar system might be so strong to push the result we obtained for the cross section up to the experimental value. Relying on their conclusions we show that the production of another very narrow loosely bound molecule, the X_s=D_s D_s*bar, could be similarly enhanced. X_s should then be detectable at CDF with a mass of 4080 MeV and a prompt production cross section of sigma(X_s) \sim 1-3 nb.Comment: Minor revisions made. To appear in Phys Lett

The Z(4430) and a New Paradigm for Spin Interactions in Tetraquarks

Following the recent confirmation of the Z+(4430) resonance with J^{PG}=1^{++}, we have re-examined the model of S- and P-wave tetraquarks. We propose a `type-II' diquark-antidiquark model which shows to be very effective at producing a simple and comprehensive picture of the J^{PG}=1^{++} and 1^{--} sectors of the recently discovered charged tetraquarks and of the observed Y resonances. The model is still faced with the unresolved difficulty of explaining why some states seem to have incomplete isospin multiplets.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, comments added, typos corrected, to appear in Phys Rev

Four-Quark Mesons

The features of a model interpreting the light scalar mesons as diquark-antidiquark bound states and the consequences of its natural extension to include heavy quarks are briefly reviewed.Comment: Talk given at the 6th Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, 21-25 Sep 200