Employment Policy in the European Union: Origins, Themes and Prospects, Edited by Michael Gold, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 326 pp., ISBN: 978-0-2305-1812-4.

The book edited by Michael Gold deals with what the editor and contributors consider as pertaining to “employment policy” at the European level. It is not often that collections of chapters address a widely diversified group of policies at this level that have an influence on, or rather, are in interaction with, policies that have remained, in principle, in the realm of national jurisdiction. This is the second, updated, edition of the book (a first version was published in 1993). In his introduction, Michael Gold defines “employment policy” as: “policy governing the relationships between employers and workers, and their rights and responsibilities, as well as measures adopted at the EU level to assist those seeking to enter or re-enter the labour market, particularly the unemployed and the economically inactive” (p. xix). He contrasts this with “social policy” (here, the author enumerates a list of topics: family, general education, retired and disabled people, or the socially excluded). Furthermore, M. Gold lets us know that to him employment policy covers not only EU hard law, but all sorts of measures including the open methods of coordination and other types of interventions. This brings an advantage to the book, because it aims at dealing with types of policy that are often separately addressed in mainstream literature on European integration; more often than not, EU level interventions in the field of EU law and what is often referred to as “soft law” are treated without cross-reference to one another. However, a definition made on the basis of a list of topics will inevitably lack a firm theoretical basis. M. Gold explicitly acknowledges the fuzziness of the frontiers, but this fails to convince the reader entirely as to the justifications for dealing with the particular list of topics and objects that were chosen for the collection of chapters. A further shortcoming of any attempt to work with a purely pragmatic list of types of policies is even more pertinent at the EU level, for two main reasons: (1) policies at the EU level are substantively different from policies at the national level, and (2) policies at the national level are not constructed homogenously across the EU member states. For instance, there has never really been such a thing as “family policy” in Italy or in the UK, whereas France has claimed to have had such a policy since the early 1930s; another example is the traditional separation in Germany between Arbeistmarktpolitik and Beschäftigungspolitik. In fact, numerous examples could be given of the complexity of concepts necessary to understand policies and their differences in-depth. At the EU level, the vagueness of the definition of the “borders” between policies is even greater when the EU only funds a minuscule part of them. The special nature of the EU is unfortunately not really addressed across the various contributions, except for the allusions made in Gold’s introduction to the book and the “overview” chapter 1, where he briefly discusses the distinction made by Giandomenico Majone. Hence, a constant ambiguity is running across the book: what exactly is the European Union and by what mechanisms can it influence various social situations in member states? The disadvantages of skipping the definition stage appear probably at their best in Anne Gray’s contribution. She documents in a rather detailed way the consequences of flexibilization strategies upon employment relationships and working conditions across the EU (including a substantial section on migrant workers and the consequences of enlargement) and she seems to assume that “flexicurity policies” are responsible for this. However, the very concept of “flexicurity”, that she rightly associates with the now less …