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Book Reviews
fer of policy concepts from one country to another, such as between
Blair’s ‘Third Way’ and the economic rhetoric (although by no means
the actual policy-making) of the Schröder government in Germany.
To some extent, Elizabeth Meehan compensates for this lack of analytical
innovation with her essay on British and German policy
towards the Social Chapter and social policy-making inside the
European Union. She is more open-minded about the possible
advantages and disadvantages of the Europeanization of one ‘model’
or the other, or, indeed, the emergence of an amalgamated new
European socio-economic ‘third way’.
Overall, this is a very valuable book with many interesting contributions.
It is successful in its important main aim of placing the bilateral
relationship in the wider context of European integration. It also
brings together contemporary historians and political scientists, which
is very welcome in these days when most historians stop their work in
accordance with the thirty year rule for the opening of government
archives and most social scientists have an exclusive interest in theory
without any historical grounding. Yet, no edited volume is without at
least one major cause for criticism. This is practically guaranteed given
the extreme difficulty of devising a coherent structure and getting
authors to respond to a common set of questions. To my mind, this
book still places much too much emphasis on governmental relations
between the two countries at a time when transnational relations
inside the European Union are not only almost always of a multilateral
character, but also evolving very quickly at a sub-governmental
level between societal actors, for example, in the form of party contacts,
the emergence of European pressure groups, and academic
expert networks. None of this is discussed in this book, but this is perhaps
just as well, as it leaves colleagues some topics on which they can
publish to avoid perishing in the next research assessment exercise.
WOL�RAM KAISER is a Senior Research �ellow of the �onds zur
�örderung der wissenschaftlichen �orschung, Professor of European
Studies at the University of Portsmouth, and Visiting Professor at the
College of Europe in Bruges. His publications include Using Europe,
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