Is the social investment state a distinctive, qualitative change in the form of the welfare state? This volume is a research output of the EU funded Network of Excellence, CINEFOGO, or Civil Society and New Forms of Governance in Europe – The Making of European Citizenship. The first part of the book provides an overview of changes in social policy and citizenship from the 1980s. It uses Marshall's concept of citizenship as a lens to view these changes, and the concept of the social investment state to focus this view on a specific set of policy measures beyond the classic, post-World War II welfare state and the neoliberalism of the 1980s and early 1990s. This new policy perspective originated in the OECD in 1996 before spreading to the EU, for example in the Lisbon Agenda of 2000, and to European member states including the UK under New Labour (Jenson, chapter three, pp. 65–6). The second and third parts of the book are divided into Western and Eastern European country case-studies respectively, and include single chapters on the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Hungary and Poland, and two chapters on the Czech Republic.

The main argument is that the social investment state moves the debate beyond a quantitative, neoliberal perspective on the welfare state that focusses on ‘controlling and reducing social spending’ taking into ‘account only the level of expenditure and the level of benefits’ (Evers and Guillemard, p. 9). Instead, the social investment state is part of a ‘qualitative debate on how to redeploy welfare to remedy its main dysfunctions and restore its effectiveness in post-industrial society’ (ibid.: p. 11). This involves ‘redesigning the very foundations of the post-war welfare state into an active, developmental welfare state that focusses on: risk prevention and protection; the agency of individuals; individualised forms of protection; new responsibility mixes between services provided by the state, private sector and civil society organisations; life-course policies; and balancing the economy with welfare’ (ibid., pp. 11–12).

Social investment involves generating ‘dividends in the future’ by reframing state spending from ‘passive expenditures’ towards ‘investments’ in order to ‘overcome new social risks’, limit social inclusion, ‘minimise the intergenerational transfer of poverty’ and to ‘ensure the population is well prepared’ for employment conditions of less job security and ‘more precarious forms of employment’ (Jenson, p. 67). It also involves making social investments ‘to grant certain rights to all individuals, providing them with the resources and services to enable them to become the authors of their own lives’ (Evers and Guillemard, p. 11). However, these rights are linked to duties in which access to benefits or services is conditional on achieving certain ‘behavioural expectations’ (ibid., p. 23).

This argument for the distinctiveness of the social investment state is often undermined by the critical analysis and evidence within the chapters of the volume. Conceptually, it competes with Gilbert's alternative concept of the enabling state in chapter 4 in which he critiques the ‘inspirational political discourse of reform’ that stresses ‘activation, social inclusion, empowerment and social responsibility’ while legitimising ‘a common core of market-oriented social policies that in essence represent the triumph of capitalism’ (p. 90). It also competes with Jenson's concept of liberal and social democratic citizenship regimes (pp. 57–8, 68–9), and Johansson and Hvinden's post-Marshallian framework in which passive and active dimensions of social citizenship are analysed in terms of socio-liberal, libertarian and republican models (pp. 50–2).

Comparatively, the apparent universalism or at least Europeanisation of the social investment state is also undermined by the societal analysis framework adopted for the country case-studies that examines ‘the effect of the combination of institutional arrangements specific to each national context’ (Evers and Guillemard, p. 14). In the concluding chapter, this is discussed first in terms of implementing the social investment state through national varieties of citizenship regimes that mix libertarian, republican and democratic features (ibid., p. 369). These national varieties are then re-categorised into ‘three distinct strategies for handling the new activating social investment agenda’, specifically liberal, social democratic and hybrid strategies (ibid., p. 370).

Empirically, the liberal strategy and social democratic strategy refer only to the UK and Sweden respectively (ibid., pp. 373–6), while the hybrid strategy is explicitly applied only in Barbier's chapter on France (pp. 164–5). Furthermore, the chapters on Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are only peripherally concerned with the social investment state and do not attempt to apply the hybrid strategy. Instead, the authors stress their country's national distinctiveness as in the German and Italian cases, or the regional distinctiveness of post-communist countries of Eastern Europe in terms of social citizenship.

The argument in support of the social investment state is further undermined by the co-editors’ internal critique of the concept. Thus, conditionality may be targeted at the ‘long-term unemployed and minorities excluded from the worlds of labour who are suspected of being too passive or even immoral or “work-shy”’ (Evers and Guillemard, p. 22). Social investment may also be targeted by selecting beneficiaries deemed able to return ‘the most profitable investment with optimal yield’ (ibid., p. 364). This selectivity raises ‘the danger of leaving individuals to themselves when they have to make decisions and plan their lives’ because ‘Not all individuals have the same ability to think strategically about their options’ (ibid., pp. 364–5). This increases the risks of ‘stigmatizing the weakest’ and ‘exacerbating social divisions’ (ibid., p. 365). This also ‘carries the risk of “dualizing” the system of social protection’ by ‘classifying certain categories as second-class citizens’ (ibid., p. 367), thereby weakening the legitimacy of ‘welfare systems’ (p. 385).

Finally, the argument for the social investment state is undermined by the fact that the chapters were ‘completed before’ the current ‘international crisis broke out’ in 2008 (p. 3). This has made a ‘gloomy scenario’ in terms of the European social model ‘more probable’ with national governments preoccupied with ‘cutting social spending’ to reduce national debts (p. 384). Furthermore, this strategy ‘may actualize all the potential risks related to the shift in welfare rhetoric towards the “activating social investment agenda”’ (p. 385). Overall, this suggests that, while the concept of a social investment state may be logically coherent, it is comparatively and empirically limited in practise within Europe; and that its distinctiveness may lie more in its rhetorical legitimation of ‘the cost-containment of welfare’ (p. 385) than as a qualitative change in the form of the welfare state.