LAUSR

UK’s perspective and the role it played in both hindering and promoting EU social integration was not unlike that of other member states, their governments and their electorates. But, ‘arguably social issues played a significant role in persuading a majority of electors in the UK to vote leave in the 2016 referendum‘(1) Her book seeks to understand what the outcome might hold for both EU and UK social policy by exploring the history and development of these matters in a chronological way. Usefully she includes a series of ‘timelines’ charting the political events, debates and crises stretching from the Spring of 1951 to 1919. Future students, when they come to write the obituary of the EU, will find these invaluable, especially the role of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who, she suggests, legitimised the UK’s latent Euroscepticism and the British rejection of the 1989 Community Charter which was adopted by only 11 member states. It could also be said that by alerting the public to the relentless pursuit of European integration and the consequent dilution of national sovereignty, the seeds of the 2016 referendum decision were duly sewn. Professor Hantrais is nevertheless right to suggest that the implications of Brexit for UK social policy in the longer term will depend to a large extent on how governments manage a new partnership with the EU institutions, from the outside and use reclaimed national control to deliver social progress whatever the exigencies of the markets. The second of these two volumes considers the much more central question which has faced the negotiators – that of the devolved entity of Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK with a land border with the EU – the nation of Ireland. The authors highlight the nature of the current border from its creation to the radical changes forged in the late 20 century when both polities were part of the EU, and then go on to discuss implications for citizenship, trade, human rights and justice, but they frankly admit that it is almost impossible to write of these matters without using disputed language. The Good Friday Agreement brought about the cessation of conflict between North and South but has ongoing and unresolved implications in constitutional terms. The EU’s involvement in Northern Ireland is ‘so pervasive that it frequently goes unnoticed’ (5) and has changed the dynamic between the UK and Ireland. The authorial team do their best to clarify the key questions but fail to offer a possible means of resolving the constitutional dilemmas beyond suggesting what a postBrexit future might hold for Northern Ireland. It might become a ‘place apart . . .a place where imaginative things can – and do – happen’ (160). One can only hope they a right.