Compliance in the Enlarged European Union Living Rights or Dead Letters [Hardcover]

This book offers a rigorous empirical and theoretical analysis of an important dimension of European integration - the implementation of EU legislation and its effect in the wake of the accession of ten new member states to the EU in 2004. The authors concentrate on the key field of social policy, which is of vital interest for the viability of the welfare state and the future of labour law standards in Europe. Following on from a previous prize-winning study, Complying with Europe: EU Harmonization and Soft Law in the Member States, this new volume looks at how EU social legislation works in practice, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries. The authors offer in-depth empirical case studies of three of the most significant pieces of EU social legislation: the Working Time Directive, the Equal Treatment Directive and the Employment Equality Directive. Their analysis makes it possible for the authors to make useful generalizations for the policy field as a whole.Contents: Preface; Introduction: the challenge of implementation research in the new member states, Gerda Falkner, Oliver Treib and Elisabeth Holzleithner; Czech Republic, Clemens Wiedermann; Hungary, Emmanuelle Causse; Slovakia, Marianne Schulze; Slovenia, Petra Furtlehner; Conclusions: the state of EU social standards in Central and Eastern European practice, Oliver Treib and Gerda Falkner; References; Index.Professor Gerda Falkner is Director of the Institute for European Integration Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria; and Associate Professor, Institute of Government, University of Vienna, Austria. She was earlier senior researcher and research group director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She is the author of EU Social Policy in the 1990s: Towards a Corporatist Policy Community (Routledge 1998) and (with Oliver Treib, Miriam Hartlapp and Simone Leiber) Complying with Europe: EU Harmonisation and Soft Law in the Member States (ls*