This is a solid, priceworthy overview of recent welfare state developments in the European Union. In other words, it is a recommendable textbook for courses on European social policy. It is written by a senior Dutch academic, a member of the establishment of official policy advice, in the EU as well as in the Netherlands. Without surprise then, it is benign and polished in tone, arguing from what in current European politics may be called a centrist perspective, sympathetic to ‘Third Way ‘recalibration’ of the welfare state, but worried about harsh neoliberalism and nationalist ‘populism’.

The scholarly value of the book is a firm trans-national empirical grasp of recent social policy developments and quantitative outcomes within a number of EU member states, primarily Western European but including much more information than usual from the East, although next to nothing on the real social outliers of the Union, the three Baltic states. There is a historical dimension, but the empirical narrative basically starts with the mid-1990s rise of the ‘social investment’ approach to social policy, and then goes into the current debt crisis, until December 2011. Hemerijck is also connected with and well read in social science studies and arguments about the welfare state, so the academic norm of collegial references is well respected.

The book comprises nine chapters, after a first, introductory outline. The author starts from what he calls the ‘New Politics’ of welfare states, about the resilience of existing democratic welfare states in the face of all neoliberal attacks, something some of us noticed and wrote about in the mid-1980s, and adds a characteristic optimistic twist to it. A new welfare state is possible. Here Hemerijck for once lets his diplomatic persona fall and goes over the ideological top: ‘At the heart of the new welfare state Gestalt is a reorientation of social citizenship, away from the compensating freedom from want logic towards the capacitating logic of freedom to act’ (p. 39, emphasis in original). Already in the next paragraph, however, he regains his balance, noting, for instance, the failings of ‘reforms in the UK’.

More interesting is the following chapter, listing five challenges to twenty-first century social provision: intensified international competition; changing gender roles; the increasing burden of commitments from the past (read, pensions); the significance of the supranational EU, and a more precarious political context, of electoral abstention and/or volatility, and a spread of national welfare chauvinism. The list and its subsequent elaboration pay remarkably little attention to immigration, and place the new European demography – of long-term diminishing fertility rates and ageing under the policy cover of pensions commitments.

Then we get another policy science theoretical chapter on welfare state ‘recalibration’, presented as social learning, with social conflicts bracketed out. This is followed by a short historical chapter on ‘Three Waves of Transformative Welfare State Change’, the period of expansion (merely mentioned), that of retrenchment and neoliberalism with their EU embodiments in the Single Market Act and the EMU, and finally the ‘social investment’ era, spearheaded by Blair, Schröder and by Wim Kok in the Netherlands. The third wave is the subject of the subsequent chapter, which is a very well-informed, although with a top-down policy-focused panorama of welfare restructuring in most of the EU member states.

Another important empirical chapter is the seventh, providing a wide-ranging quantitative overview, largely taken from Eurostat and the OECD, of actual welfare performance. If one agrees with the author that a child-centred social investment strategy is a key priority, then the worst performers are Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland and the UK – with high rates of child poverty (on this score joined by Poland and Ireland; the Baltics are below the radar) and the highest rates of early school leaving (pp. 236, 240–1, 281).

The penultimate chapter, sandwiched between two policy pleas, follows up the other empirical chapters with a good update on European social policy in the crisis years of 2008–11.

European welfare states are caught up in a double bind, Hemerijck argues. On the one hand, they are bound by a domestic social contract of welfare provision, and, on the other, they are committed to European market integration, which infringes upon national social rights, and member states are collectively unable to move social policy to the European level, given institutional differences and controversy. Always the possibilist, Hemerijck believes that this double bind can be escaped, and that the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 and the Europe 2020 Strategy offer a social space for it, in spite of the conspicuous failure of the previous Lisbon Strategy. As a good Continental European, Hemerijck is placing his hopes on a ‘more political EU becoming a reliable guardian of a more “caring” EU’. Hopes are for free, and benevolent ones deserve sympathy. But social analysis had better never lose its critical edge, even if what comes up should smell more like a rat than a rose garden.

The current crisis and the austerity of social cuts and rights abrogations pursued by the EU – unveiling itself as less ‘caring’ even than the IMF – and by the rightwing governments of the British Isles are hitting the weakest and the most vulnerable societies, and their children and youth the hardest. The EU is most likely to be resilient enough to survive, but its current policy orientation is dividing the continent, not integrating it. The Eurozone may soon get new Eastern members. If, and with what commitment Poland will join is still hanging in the balance. Its neoliberal elite can ill afford to ignore the social concerns of its population. The entry of the Baltics, which have largely disenfranchised their poor population, on the other hand, would mean more votes for social disintegration.

Studies of European social policies will have to be supplemented by investigations of their politics, of the interests, the ideologies, the forces involved and their conflicts and clashes. But whatever your views of and your stand in this field, from which arrogance, greed and social viciousness are not to be excluded a priori, you will benefit from learning professor Hemerijck's knowledge about European social policies in the 1990s–2000s.