Without any doubt, the book written by Zimmermann is a timely intervention into current academic research as well as in public and political discussion on potential effects of cohesion policies in implementing European Union (EU) strategies at the ground level. It is important to emphasize the importance of this book. Despite a growing political and academic interest into Europeanisation, previous welfare studies have often paid attention to the link between EU and the national level, neglecting the relevance of the subnational (most local) dimension, which is the basic and perhaps most important level of implementation; it is at local level that most welfare policies are put into practice.

In the introductory chapter, the author is using the well-known ‘Trojan Horse’ as a metaphor in order to describe how EU’s cohesion policies affects the domestic level. Excluding the aspect of an enemy from the used metaphor, it is explained that EU policies can be described as monetary incentives in a ‘gilded horse’ trying to bypass national as well as regional and local regulatory pathways for imposing influence in every member state. In order to receive EU funding, the beneficiaries has to comply with the conditions and procedural requirements imposed by the funding actor. Zimmermann makes a demarcation and chooses an empirical focus on the European Social Fund (ESF) and its funding role within local labour market policies. The main aim is to study ‘what happens in practice’ (p. 3) at subnational level, when the beneficiaries of funding from ESF need to deal with the ‘gilded horse’ of EU’s cohesion policy, by paying particular attention on those actors who put the policies into practice. The research questions are formulated in an open way: ‘How local actors put the policies into practice, how they deal with what comes from the European level and what this might mean for the local actors, their organisational structures or even their policies and programmes /…/’ (ibid.).

The empirical material is based on comprehensive in-depth case studies conducted in 18 local entities in six European countries covering five activation regimes: Sweden, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Poland. The empirical data was gathered within the framework of an EU FP7-funded project (LOCALISE) with a scientific team responsible for the empirical tasks in the respective country. The analytical perspective is linked to the research of Europeanisation with a specific interest for the domestic adaptation to the EU’s cohesion policies. Zimmermann utilises qualitative comparative analysis and case study-based interpretation in order to analyse the empirical material. The author explain that both the ‘effects of cause’ and the ‘causal mechanisms’ perspectives are relevant because ‘a key interest of this study is in the effects of structural funding in terms of domestic change and the causal process linking the ESF and this domestic change’ (p. 45). However, the aim in this book is to study the potential effects which is not the same as effects and the methodological aspect that the empirical data is based on interviews makes it problematic to discuss in terms of ‘causal mechanisms’ which requires other research methods underpinned by different ontological and epistemological assumptions. The same argument is applicable when it comes to the author’s main aim in this book to study ‘what happens in practice’. When it comes to data based on qualitative methods, using interviews provides access to the respondents’ thoughts and feelings on the topic we are keen to understand which should not be regarded per se as ‘what happens in practice’.

Beyond the introductory chapter, the book is divided into eight chapters, each focusing on a specific topic. Each chapter is linked in a clear way to the aim presented in this book. Nevertheless, the Second and the Third Chapters stands for itself being a microstudy of different themes about the Europeanisation of the subnational level, albeit some key publications from current research are absent.

The penultimate chapter is the most valuable assessed from a theoretical stand of point; in this chapter, the study’s findings are presenting, by a skillfully high level of abstraction, through a typology of different local responses to the ESF among 18 local cases:

1. (i) refuseniks (or non-usage – 6 cases) meaning a view at ESF as an unattractive funding opportunity due to several aspects (such as co-funding intertwined with complicated bureaucracy) and therefore refuse to use it,

2. (ii) cream skimmers (or usage without change – 5 cases) which consider ESF as a worthwhile and favorable tool in order to strategically use financial as well as programmatic dimension of the ESF in implementing own pre-defined ideas which in the end actually generates only very limited field changes and

3. (iii) transformers (or usage and change – 7 cases) considering ESF as matching own ideas at local level, having adequate competence in dealing with the multifaceted administration of the ESF and accepting co-funding, finding the European resources as a strong incentive for achieve stable change which extends beyond the projects and even used in other contexts.

This typology has, as Zimmermann explain in Chapter Eight, a clear potential to be applied in studies of other local entities receiving ESF funding with similar contextual conditions. The author demonstrates in a convincing way the theoretical transferability in a thought experiment comparing ESF with FOCEM, the structural fund of Mercosur, mainly implemented at the national level by public authorities (created in 1991 by the Asunción Treaty with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay as founding members).

In the last chapter, Zimmermann draws the main conclusion based on the empirical insights and for social scientists not surprising at all: namely, that there is not a single story of Europeanisation but different reactions of the beneficiaries on how they engage and therefore respond to the ESF/‘Trojan Horse’. In this chapter, the author reflects, in a thoughtful and relevant way, on the contributions and limitations of the study presented in this book.

This book has been rewarding to read, especially due to the focus on subnational dimension and local patterns of responses to the European ‘gilded horse’ regarding activation policies and services. The main value of this book is, however, the developed and empirical-based typology that has a clear theoretical transferability in future studies trying to understand similar local cases across Europe linked to cohesion policies funded by the EU. I wish to end this book review by quoting Zimmermann’s last sentences in her highly interesting book, particularly important in these times dominated by right-wing populism and Euroscepticism:

‘The European project is not seen as a social cohesion project. Shifting autonomy to the local level, involving local actors in decision-making processes, giving redistributed funding to citizens on the ground and – last but not least – increasing the redistributive power of Europe in general could strongly contribute to making the European project a project of European citizens. The EU already has the feet on the ground, as the example of the ESF shows, so why should the existing bypass strategies not be turned into a route to European integration? In this way, ‘gilded horses’ could be tamed, ridden and utilised by everyone in Europe, and Trojan tricks of ‘levering in’ and seeking top-down compliance would become redundant.’