The subtitle The EU and National Social Policy should not be misinterpreted in the sense that this study would analyse in detail the implementation of EC social policy. In fact, the practical impact at the national level of the EC’s specific social and labour law Directives largely stays an issue to be explored, notably in a broad comparative perspective. At this still rather early stage of the ‘second image reversed’ debate (i.e. on the effects of European integration on the national political systems and policies), however, it should be underlined that it is already a major achievement to present relevant EU measures which serve as an input into the national social policy processes and to reflect on European integration (in both the social and the economic realms) as a general framework in which contemporary national policy making takes place, as most chapters in this volume do.

It would probably have been too ambitious a research design for an ‘edited book’ to elaborate a systematic concept of the various kinds of feedback effects of European (social) integration into the member states, as a joint basis to be applied in all chapters. Nevertheless, many readers might have found the book, which aims to ‘examine the impact of the European Union on the formation and content of national social policy’, even more useful if the authors had applied common systematic yardsticks for measuring and comparing, in the different sub-fields: the EU-competences and policy styles; the amount of secondary law adopted, in relation to national activity in the fields; and the kinds of – and the degree of – adaptational pressure and the various restrictions to act unilaterally at the national level. That all these topics meld into each other throughout the book may lead to some misunderstandings. This is already documented in the ECSA-USA Review of Fall 1999, where a reviewer wrongly concluded that equal opportunities for men and women would be a field where integration was occurring only slowly, when compared with other social areas. The origin of the misunderstanding may be that Sonia Mazey, in her extremely interesting chapter on the EU and women’s rights, focuses on implementation problems and questionable practical effects (in the UK and France) to a larger extent than most other authors do for their fields – which should, however, not lead readers to overlook that the EU (often via its court) has had a rather more important and certainly more direct role in this particular sub-field of social policy than it has had in the others included in the collection.

In any case, as long as readers keep in mind that the chapters are in many ways not directly comparable, since they are not the result of a tightly co-ordinated research project, they will benefit a lot from this collection of texts edited by David Hine and Hussein Kassim. The discussions tackle (to varying extents) the potential usefulness of EU activities in the social sphere, the state of development of specific EU policies and, finally (in a sometimes more and sometimes less general manner), the latter’s practical effects on the member states. They cover a number of fields and topics: the ‘social contract’ in the wider sense (Martin Rhodes), unemployment policy (Richard Jackman), social dumping (David Goodhart), labour market challenges and monetary union (Jens Bastian), social partnership (Michael Gold), women’s rights (Sonia Mazey) and training policy (Susan Milner). Somewhat outside the social policy focus of the book, but clearly of general interest, are the contributions by Giandomenico Majone (‘Understanding regulatory growth in the EC’) and by David Freestone and Aaron McLoughlin (on environmental protection).