Book Review: Europe’s Other: European Law Between Modernity and Postmodernity
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900416 |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Carl F. Stychin |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
vision more grounded in day-to-day life. Women do not engage in welfare tourism.
The complex interaction of formal social status with isolation and popular culture has
a significant impact on their autonomy. Other researchers have presumed that migra-
tion has less impact on women as they often take up work that facilitates discontinous
patterns of employment. But Ackers demonstrates that the fracturing of women’s
careers, mixed with marriage and caring obligations, results in high levels of depen-
dency and reduces access to social protection in the host state.
The life experiences of women are not chronological. They express a mixture of
work, non-work and family obligations. Although the ECJ has moved from protect-
ing benefits connected to employment to a more expansive approach, Ackers quite
convincingly unfolds the reality of migrant women who too often fall from the busi-
ness class of protected workers to the club class of the worker’s family members or to
the tourist class where economically inactive persons are found. In this typology,
women involved in caring activities, as well as women in need of vocational training,
are put at risk in the absence of an effective European citizenship. If Community law
can be said to have positively evolved in order to protect most substantive rights in
the case of employed workers and members of their family, the personal scope of pro-
tection is still unsure in the case of women’s unpaid work, which obviously is central
to this research. In many cases, migrant women do not have an independent and
autonomous right to social benefits in a host state.
Ackers’ work certainly shows clearly that Community law does not address in a
coherent manner the issue of women as women with specific obligations in the private
and public domaine (for example volunteer work). They are therefore deprived of
effective citizenship rights in relation to professional training, independent access to
social protection and the benefits of national family policies.
For Ackers and her research team, women’s citizenship must be construed in a
framework that is not limited to women’s formal work or to the working pattern of
a male breadwinner. The interviews conducted revealed just such aspirations among
migrant women. Because women must be seen not as ‘followers’, but as having a story
of their own when migrating inside the EU, Ackers’ work sets the stage for a gen-
dered interpretation of Article 17 (ex Article 8) of the Treaty on European Union. It
is to be hoped that, by virtue of its fundamental character, Article 17 will alleviate the
somehow unpredictable, but still evolving, story of Articles 58 (ex Article 48) et seq.
of the main Treaty (mobility rights). This remains to be seen. But with Ackers’ work
now available, evidence of the true stories of migrant women will help the ECJ to
revisit assumptions on the basis of which decisions were crafted.
LUCIE LAMARCHE
Department of Law, University of Québec at Montréal
PETER FITZPATRICK AND JAMES HENRY BERGERON (Eds), Europe’s Other: European
Law Between Modernity and Postmodernity. Aldershot: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 1998,
259pp., £42.50.
Until recently, European law largely has been ‘colonized’ by technocrats, who managed
to build a veritable academic ‘fortress’ around their subject. Perhaps because of the con-
struction of European legal integration as a highly technical process, critical scholars
seemed to resist aiming their analyses at this most suitable target. However, that is now
changing, and the contributors to Europe’s Other are to be commended for this timely,
varied, but consistently important intervention in European academic and political
debates. The editors describe their focus as being ‘with identity and alterity in relation
600 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 9(4)
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