Changing French Reconciliation Policies and the Usages of Europe: Reluctant Europeanization?

For at least a decade now, an increasing number of authors have defended the idea that, in order to grasp all the aspects of welfare state transformation, the relationships between European and national policies have to be taken into account.* Despite the fact that states, in the context of European integration welfare, have become semi-sovereign (Leibfried and Pierson, 1995), few researchers have focussed on the interaction between the EU and national social policy developments (Palier, 2000; Falkner et al., 2005; Zeitlin and Pochet, 2005; Kvist and Saari, 2007; Jacquot, 2008; Heidenreich and Zeitlin, 2009). These authors believe that insufficient attention has been paid to the impact of European integration on the development of social policy at the national level, and to the mechanisms through which European policies impact the development of social policy in European member states. These works have shown that European influence is not necessarily direct nor is it strictly limited to legally binding regulations (see Fiona Beveridge’s Chapter 2)