| Review of: | The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the New Spatial Politics of Social Protection by M. Ferrera |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Knut Roder |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 28/03/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 1, Pages 211-229 |
Book Reviews
Throughout the process of European integration it has been possible to witness the alteration of the boundaries of national welfare and social policy regimes. Welfare has traditionally been a policy domain that dynamically affects communities' distinctive cohesive relationships and self-perception within nationally defined units. Ferrera's investigation of the impact and interaction of European integration on the national welfare policy starts with an attempt to develop a theoretical framework that conceptualizes in a helpful manner the welfare state as a 'bounded space' that structures social citizenship within the 'state-building tradition'.
The next two chapters deal with the early stages of the evolving European welfare state and provide an analysis of national post-Second World War welfare state building and expansions. This is followed by a description of how these national trends eventually encounter an expanding European integration process that inevitably produces a reduction of national social sovereignty. The relationship between partly conflicting national welfare regimes and the growing welfare dimension of European integration is well documented and analysed with the help of numerous useful examples. Next, Ferrera looks at current sub-national and trans-national social protection strategies, which he argues, tend to develop and be structured along the lines of 'welfare regions'.
The book concludes with a chapter assessing current developments and future trends in social protection in the European Union. Here, the current pressures of European integration towards the 'destructuring' of domestic arrangements for social sharing is ever-present and a constant reminder of the lack of shared beliefs or aspirations of EU Member States to agree on more common arrangements regarding social protection (as documented by the sidelined welfare policy aspects in the Constitutional Treaty). Overall, Ferrera's analysis confirms that trends towards national 'destructuring', as well as defensive restructuring in the areas of welfare and spatial politics of social protection, will continue to interact with developments at the EU supranational level. The overall degree of that interaction will inevitably depend on the future determination, speed and direction of expansion, or lack of it, of the welfare policy dimension at the European level.