Centralised Enforcement, Legitimacy and Good Governance in the EU – By Melanie Smith

Date01 July 2011
Published date01 July 2011
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2011.00565_2.x
eulj_565551..560
BOOK REVIEWS
The End of Territoriality? The Impact of ECJ Rulings on British, German and French
Social Policy. By Andreas Obermaier. London: Ashgate, 2009. 234 pp. Hb. £55.
This extremely interesting and well-written book by Andreas Obermaier has a mislead-
ing title. According to its author, it ‘is located in the intersection of political and legal
sciences and contributes to both worlds equally. It makes four innovative contributions
to the fields of Europeanisation, implementation of/compliance with EU law, and
social policy research’ (p 4). However, while Obermaier’s analyses in relation to Euro-
peanisation and implementation/compliance are based on solid methodology and rich
primary material (in the form of interviews with officials from the EU and the Member
States concerned), the part on social policy is quite short and hardly justifies the title of
the book.
Europeanisation and implementation/compliance are intertwined topics, and the
author puts more weight on the latter than on the former. In this respect, his work is
original in many ways. For one thing, he focuses on the implementation of/compliance
with ECJ (now CJEU) judgments, instead of looking into legislation. What is more, he
examines a long series of judgments over a period of nine years instead of looking at a
single judgment (Kohll/Decker (1998), Smits-Peerbooms/Vanbraekel (2001), Müller-
Fauré/Inizan (2003), Leichtle (2004), Keller (2005), Watts/Acereda Herrera (2006), and
Stamatelaki (2007)). Last but not least, he follows a comparative approach, whereby
three countries with different constitutional settings and administrative traditions are
being compared; what is more, these countries are representative of different healthcare
systems.
The author observes that all member states initially adopted a consistently negative
and defensive stance towards Kohll and Decker. Indeed, most states (especially those
which did not operate a refund system, and even more so, the NHS states) considered
the judgments not to be relevant to them, while some others, like France, openly issued
circulars to resist the application of this case law in their territory. In the years that
followed, however, and in the light of successive clarifying judgments from the CJEU,
the implementation/compliance patterns of different Member States became consider-
ably divergent. Explaining why such differentiation has occurred is the main objective
of the book. Indeed, after ‘Theorizing Implementation Processes of ECJ Rulings’ and
‘Conceptualizing the ECJ’s Integration Function’ in Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4
presents in a very brief, yet concise manner the successive judgments and their respec-
tive added value. Then, in Chapters 5–8, the author tells the stories of implementing
these judgments in the EU as a whole, and then in some detail in the three countries
compared: France, Germany, and the UK (England and Wales). The three stories
make for an agreeable narration full of insight and exciting details, less so for useful
comparisons. To complete the case studies, the author expounds on the impact of the
follow-up judgments of the Court, as a means of clarifying/facilitating implementation
(Chapter 9) and on the role of the Commission as an agent pushing for implementation
(Chapter 10).
European Law Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4, July 2011, pp. 551–560.
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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