Sherrod, Lonnie R., Flanagan, Constance A., Kassimir, Ron and Syvertsen, Amy K. (eds): Youth Activism: An International Encyclopaedia, Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 2006, 759 pp, 2 vols, ISBN 0-3131-32812-9
A total of 212 authors, most of them from the United States, contributed to this ‘international encyclopaedia’ on Youth Activism, edited by psychologist Lonnie R. Sherrod, educationalist Constance A. Flanagan, political scientist Ron Kassimir and Amy K. Syvertsen. Thus, the questions and subjects with which the articles deal are mostly specific to the United States (e.g., ‘Religiosity and American Youth’, ‘National and Community Service’ and ‘Minority Youth Voter Turnover’). The predominance of subjects typical to the United States (e.g., the subject of ‘Moral Exemplars’ (Vol. 2: 412–19) can be considered ‘typically US-American’ as it refers to a concept of citizenship informed by ‘deliberate democracy’ and contemporary forms of civil society activism and engagement in the United States) remains uncontested even though there are also contributions dealing with ‘Youth Activism in Nigeria’ (Vol. 2: 442–47), ‘Youth Activism in Russia’ (Vol. 2: 542–50), ‘Youth and Citizenship in Eastern Europe’ (Vol. 1: 222–25) and ‘Zionist Youth Organizations’ (Vol. 2: 710–13).
This is only partly explained by the fact that most of the contributors come from the United States (only 21 of 212 authors come from Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom). It is, rather, an effect of the origin of the concept of ‘activism’. In the United States, the concept is neatly connected to citizenship. Thus, the question arises, whether activism as a concept can be transferred to other societies in the world or other forms of activism without consideration. Is it not precisely this close relationship of activism and citizenship that makes it difficult to acknowledge and analyse those activisms, escaping or even fighting against this socially appreciated citizenship? I think it is precisely because the editors do not explain (or even consider) the scope of their concept of activism that this question arises again and again from different perspectives when using the encyclopaedia, including: the selection of articles and subjects, the normative objectives scholars (not the youth activists themselves) connect to the social and political engagement of young people, and the methodological validity and usefulness of the concept ‘Youth Activism’ when it comes to the analysis of empirical data and events. Closely related to this last perspective is the question of who are the intended addressees of the encyclopaedia. Are they scholars and researchers of youth activism or the scientific community and political bodies that are critical of citizenship and youth activism?
The selection of key words, as well as the forewords and introductions to the encyclopaedia by Constance A. Flanagan, Amy K. Syvertsen (‘Youth as a Social Construct and Social Actor’, Vol. 1: 11–19) and Ron Kassimir (‘Youth Activism: International and Transnational, Vol. 1: 20–28), suggest that the concept of ‘Youth Activism’ used here is wide-ranging and fully expected to be applicable to many different forms of activism throughout the world and to go beyond the historical forms of activism in the 1960s and 1970s during the American civil rights movement, where the concept came to life a second time. Yet questions of range and validity remain unquestioned by the editors. Almost ignoring possible methodological problems, they emphasise the importance of activism for adolescents and for democracies. This normative attitude might be one reason, among others, why many articles deal with the numerous American juvenile activism organisations (e.g., ‘AmeriCorps’, Vol. 1: 65–69), or why so many contributions stress the social (‘Adult Partners in Youth Activism’, Vol. 1: 31–38) or individual (‘Identity and Activism’, Vol. 1: 319–22) benefits of youth activism.
What has motivated selection remains opaque. There are articles on Youth Activism in Australia, Nigeria, Russia and so on. Chinese movements are recognised in an article on the Tiananmen Square Massacre (‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’, Vol. 2: 639–43). Readers are introduced to youth activism in Germany in a really good and informative article on Turkish immigrants in Berlin – the so-called ‘2nd generation’ (‘Immigrant Youth in Europe – Turks in Germany’, Vol. 1: 329–36), but this article is supposed to cover the whole subject of immigration in Europe. Why have these countries been chosen? Why not Japan, Scandinavia or more African societies? The lack of articles providing an historical overview on activism and youth activism (on the empirical movements and on activism as a subject to research) is noticeable. This is – interestingly enough – especially true for the development of youth activism in the United States. The strikes of the child labourers in the coal mines in Appalachia during the 1930s, the Newsboys Strike in New York in 1899 and the foundation of American Youth Congress are not mentioned in the encyclopaedia at all. The editor's bias, or blindness, also affects the articles: Only some refer to the state-of-the-art, and only a few consider their object of research as not simply a given fact, but (also) a scientific artefact, designed by researchers.
This critique, which is addressed mainly to the editors and their design of the encyclopaedia (e.g., selection of articles) leads to another criticism: the encyclopedia's implicit normative bias. As argued, the conception of youth activism that informs the design remains vague. Citizenship and engagement in civil society are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the normative objectives of youth activism. They seem to legitimise both the young activists as well as the researcher's interest in the subject. Because society benefits, so it seems, activists deserve society's acknowledgement, encouragement and scientific attention. Thus, it makes sense that both volumes are dedicated ‘to those young people throughout history who have risked their own well-being, comfort and safety to make the world a better place for their fellow men and woman’ (Vols 1 and 2: 2). One cannot well argue that adolescent neo-Nazis strive for a better world for (all) their fellow men and women, but does this mean they are not activists? At first, editor Ron Kassimir does not exclude any political expression, may it be left or right: ‘it is important to remember, that much “non-progressive” activism may also come from young people who are marginalized, feel threatened and seek to change the policies and behaviors of powerful institutions’ (‘Youth Activism: International and Transnational’, Vol. 1: 20–28, esp. 23). Yet these unwanted youth activisms are not really recognised by the entries. The article on terrorism, for example, discusses the reactions of young people to 9/11, but not the involvement of children and adolescents in contemporary terrorism (‘Youth Activism Responses to Terrorism’, Vol. 2: 635–39). The whole encyclopaedia appears to be haunted by the question of what activism is desirable and what is not. Another example would be the otherwise readable and interesting article on ‘Punk Rock Youth Subculture’ (Vol. 2: 509–11). Are punks true activists despite the fact that (or because?) they, as contributor Gokhan Balaban writes, ‘show little imperative to engage in civil or political matters’ (Vol. 2: 510)? Or, this is a question I expect the editors should have answered, should not phenomena like punk give reason to question the concept of activism, or, at least, be true to one's own normative implications?
Coming of age and growing into responsible citizenship is a goal activists do not attach to their actions as, last but not least, the encyclopaedia itself shows, young people are not striving to become citizens when they protest and contest the status quo. They act for cause. Citizenship and responsibility are values researchers may find when building their subject. The close connection of activism and citizenship appears to be self-evident to the editors and some contributors. At least they do not bother to explain or discuss reasons. Yes, there are educational and psychological findings and research that deal with the genesis of citizenship and the editors commit themselves to the concept of ‘positive youth development approach’ (e.g., Constance A. Flanagan and Amy K. Syvertsen, ‘Youth as a Social Construct and Social Actor’, Vol. 1: 11–19, esp. 11), but whether this connection is justified on an analytical or a normative level is not subject to reflection. This absence marks the limits of the concept and it becomes crucial to the question of why young people protest and fight against at all. Following Constance A. Flanagan und Amy K. Syvertsen, the main reason is simply because, due to their developmental passage, young people are ‘free to explore different ideas, values, lifestyles, religious and cultural traditions, and political views’ (Vol. 1: 16). This may (potentially) be true for white, middle-class children and adolescents, but it is definitely not true for those who grow up in extreme poverty and/or totalitarian regimes. The social and political conditions for activism are not discussed in the encyclopaedia, while psychological models dominate. This again points to the methodological limitedness of the concept. The most noticeable result is the eclectic selection of keywords. These criticisms do not mean that the articles are not read able or interesting or cannot tell anything about their subjects – to the contrary. However, they do mean that this encyclopaedia is not a compendium of youth activism.
Cathren Müller, Vienna, Austria
©2007 Cathren Müller
Lynch, Julia: Age in the Welfare State. The Origins of Social Spending on Pensioners, Workers, and Children, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 224 pp., ISBN-13 978-0-521-61516-7 paperback.
‘Welfare states work better for some age groups than for others’. This first sentence of the introductory chapter perfectly explains what this book is about: the age orientation of social policies. That is, how and why welfare states distribute resources to respond to the risks faced by people at different stages in the life course.
The book uses two distinct methodological approaches. The first part (chapter 2) looks at patterns of social spending in 20 OECD countries. By looking at spending in three areas of social policy: direct social expenditure on social insurance benefits, education, and health care; tax expenditures on welfare-substituting goods; and housing policies, the author creates an “Elderly/non-elderly spending ratio” to estimate the relative weight of spending on the elderly versus that on working age adults and children. The ratio gives a very varied picture across countries that, as the author points out, does not resemble regimes-types: “the weak correspondence between the age orientation of social policy regimes and welfare state “worlds” or “families” suggests that there is an important dimension of variation among different kinds of welfare states that familiar typologies do not capture” (pg. 6). Following from here, chapter 3 looks at the causes of such variation. Adopting a historical and path-dependent explanatory framework, the author concludes that two main set of factors have the main responsibility for the particular age orientation of social policy in each country. These are: The structure of welfare programmes enacted in the early 20th century (occupational vs citizenship) and the dominant role of political competition (that is, how politicians compete within a party system: polity, particularistic or programmatic). Programmatic political competition enables the establishment of citizenship-based welfare regimes which tend to be more youth-oriented. By contrast, a particularistic form of politics leads to occupational welfare regimes notably biased towards the elderly. The interaction between different organizational modes, forms of political competition and the age profile of welfare states is, according to the author, determined by two chronological ‘great divides’ that marked the evolution of welfare regimes in all developed countries. In the ‘First Critical Juncture’ during the late 19th and early 20th century welfare states developed either along occupational or citizenship lines, and as they matured they consolidated as elderly or youth oriented correspondingly. During the ‘Second Critical Juncture’ occupational welfare states had the opportunity to become citizenship-based, some, the Netherlands for instance, succeeded and some, such as Italy, did not. As a result, Lynch explains, The Netherlands is today a non-elderly oriented welfare state while Italy remains deeply elderly-oriented. The second part of the book (chapters 4 to 6), takes an in-depth qualitative case study of these two countries in an attempt to understand the reasons behind such variations in the age profile of social spending in the two countries. The analysis is centred on three main types of benefits: unemployment (chapter 4); family allowances (chapter 5) and old-age (Chapter 6) concluding that the way in which core politicians use welfare programmes to compete with one another and the pre-existing structure of social programmes by an large determine the age orientation of welfare regimes.
Lynch's argument about the dynamic of mutual reinforcement between social programme development and political competition in explaining policy outcomes is a persuasive and robust one. The question however is whether these two factors that explain the age orientation of the Dutch and Italian welfare states could also be used to understand social policy developments in other countries, proposing then an alternative or a complement to existing theories of welfare typologies. Although the idea that clientelism prevented the development of citizenship-based social programmes in Italy is a powerful one, it might not be easy to transfer it to other elderly-oriented welfare states where clientelism is not a distinctive political practice. Equally relevant, the social programmes chosen: unemployment benefits, old age pensions and family allowances might be insufficient to unravel the age orientation of welfare states. To give just an example, in some countries, most notably southern European welfare states, family allowance has a very problematic existence, its absence does not necessarily signal a bias towards the elderly but a particular historical and ideological legacy that pushes family allowance to the margins of social spending. In this case, as well as in the study of the other social policy domains, a crucial variable is left out of the picture: the gendered dimension of welfare states, and yet, there seems to be a clear link between the two: welfare systems that are more youth-oriented tend to be more supportive of women's independence by, for instance, helping those that are in paid employment and have caring responsibilities. On the contrary, elderly-oriented welfare states tend to have difficulties in supporting women's roles as carers and workers. A closer scrutiny to the relationship between the age and gender components of welfare states will shed light on the understanding of how welfare states develop.
To conclude, Lynch's book will certainly occupy a central position in the field of comparative welfare state analysis, opening up new lines for future research; given space limitations, this review has only covered part of the rich and thorough study of this unexplored dimension of variation of welfare states.
Margarita León, University of Kent, UK
© 2007 Margarita León
Faist, Thomas and Andreas Ette (eds): The Europeanization of National Policies and Politics of Immigration, Houndmills and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4039-8713-6
The increasing political and economic integration of the European Union (EU) has been accompanied by ever more stringent measures in relation to the treatment of migrants and refugees. The European integration of immigration policies is one of the most significant task expansions of the EU in recent years. The Amsterdam Treaty brought immigration policies into the community pillar and incorporated the Schengen Agreement into the acquis communautaire. Since 2005, decision-making on EU immigration policies is by qualified majority voting and subject to co-decision by the European Parliament. Furthermore, in 2005 the European Border Agency (Frontex) was established. European law on visa and most asylum and refugee issues is now binding, and only Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom have opted out of certain provisions. As migration policies in the EU have so far focused on restriction and control and the reinforcement of external borders, legal migration and integration policies are still national competencies.
This edited book explores three main research questions: what has been Europeanized (policies or politics); what is the extent of Europeanization; and what explains the differential impact of the EU? The book is divided into three parts. The first comprises three rather disparate chapters that explore key issues of the Europeanization of national policies and politics of immigration. The chapters of the second part deal with the European impact in the EU member states Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, and Greece. The chapters of the third part scrutinise the Europeanisation of immigration policies and politics in Poland, Turkey, Albania, and the impact on third countries and international organisations.
The introductory chapter by Andreas Ette and Thomas Faist sets out the key research questions, concepts and results. One of the main conclusions of the study is that the impact of the EU was far greater on the national policies than on the national politics of immigration. In general, traditional national patterns of policy-making, characterized by a strong executive dominance, have been reinforced. In terms of policies, the impact of the EU was highly differential. The authors identify as the crucial explanatory variable for this differential impact the mode of Europeanization. In older member states, the discursive mode of Europeanization is found to have led to greater national policy changes, whereas in newer member states, the extent of Europeanization was higher where the prescriptive mode of Europeanization was applied.
The chapter on ‘The Europeanization of What?’ by Andrew Geddes makes the important point that Europeanization is often a political-strategic choice by member states who try to ‘escape to Europe’ to avoid domestic constraints. Europeanization should therefore be understood as a two-way process, in which desired policies are ‘uploaded’ in order to minimize the costs of ‘downloading’.
The country case studies follow roughly the same structure. After providing some contextual information, they consider the impact of the EU on policies and politics of immigration and then discuss the main driving forces and explanatory factors. Some of the country case studies are highly intriguing. The chapter on the United Kingdom, written by Andreas Ette and Jürgen Gerdes, demonstrates that national interests are a crucial variable for the extent of Europeanization, with the country participating in coercive measures, but opting out of protective measures. The chapter on Sweden by Mikael Spång highlights the role of domestic conflict lines in the Swedish parliament that pre-existed EU membership. Spain and Greece have been facing rapidly growing numbers of immigrants in the last two decades. The chapter on Greece, by Georgia Mavrodi, is remarkable in so far as it faces up to the problem of attributing domestic changes to the impact of the EU and examines a number of other explanatory factors. The chapter on Poland, written by Anna Kicinger, Agnieszka Weinar and Agata Górny, shows how immigration started to be perceived by policy-makers as a problem in a country without significant numbers of immigrants. In Albania and Turkey, the situation was characterized by highly coercive and prescriptive modes of Europeanisation governed by conditionality. The final chapter of the book, by Sandra Lavenex, examines the external face of Europeanization. It argues that international organizations such as the IOM and the UNHCR have increasingly become partners and subcontractors in the EU's widening external migration cooperation.
As legal migration remains a national competency, the main focus of the book is on unwanted – or ‘illegal’ – immigration. The scope of the book is further limited by an emphasis on legislative (rather than administrative) changes, and by generally failing to consider the implementation of nationally adopted policies. Nevertheless, the book is an enriching contribution to the literature on the European integration of immigration policies. I can recommend the book in particular to readers with an interest in the policies and politics of immigration in the countries covered by this book.
Bernd Rechel, University of Birmingham, UK
©2007 Bernd Rechel