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14 J. Soc. Welfare & Fam. L. 1 (1992)

handle is hein.journals/jnlosclwl14 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial Social policy in Europe, the road to Maastricht, and the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law While the connection between these three matters might not be immedi- ately obvious, it is nonetheless significant. The Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law has launched its new focus on social policy and the law in the European context not only at the beginning of the year during which the single internal market in the European Community is due to be com- pleted, with all the attendent implications for social policy, but also at the conclusion of a process of renegotiation of the aims of the EC during which social policy has figured as consistently one of the hottest of the political hot potatoes. At the Summit of Heads of State and Government at Maastricht in the Netherlands in December 1991, when draft treaties on political, economic and monetary union were agreed, social policy became one of the victims of the compromise in the difficult process of achieving agreement between 12 Member States. The prospect of a two-speed Eur- ope in the field of social policy, with the United Kingdom clinging to the notion that it can opt-in and opt-out of the European agenda as and when it pleases, offers a much more bleak prospect for the future than might have been expected a few months ago. However, the decisions of the Member States in Maastricht may them- selves not be fully determinative of the social policy debates in the coming years. Few would have predicted five years ago (i.e. just after the conclu- sion of the Single European Act) that the EC, not only through its supra- national institutions, the Commission and the Parliament, but also in the form of its constituent Member States which meet in the Council, amongst which number certain deeply conservative governments at present, would spend a significant proportion of the intervening years considering, if not always acting upon, the social policy agenda. The spread, dimensions and current dynamics of social law and policy in Europe are, it is hoped, at least hinted at by the papers collected in this special issue. Together they illus- trate the role of the founding Treaties (particularly in the enduring fields of free movement of workers and social security for migrant workers, as well as in the emerging area of educational law), the impact of the first activist phase of Community social policy (for example, in the equal treatment field), and the gathering momentum of social policy developments under the single European Act (in the illustrative field of protection of the work- ing environment). Wider perspectives are added by essays which illustrate the interaction between the economic and the social in a quasi-federal EC, and the developing role of comparative empirical work in the social policy arena in a Europe where the present Member States may not always be foreign countries to each other. It is a tribute to the rapidly changing nature of this field that a representative collection of essays five years ago 1

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