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With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church-State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims' religious needs in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often stated that there is no standard definition of a ‘welfare state’. A survey of the standard textbooks supports this claim. It is also often the case that academic works on welfare state and social policy history earmark lines or even pages to discussing the origins of the term welfare state. However, these brief accounts are often wrong in the details and are missing important aspects. In our article we offer the first detailed study of the origin of the term ‘welfare state’ tracing it back to the mid-19th century Germany and following its diverse and changing definitions in the German and British context until the 1940s. The study adds decades to the conventional understanding of this history and offers a more nuanced understanding of the different definitions attributed to the term before its political breakthrough in the late 1940s. Projecting this post-war understanding backwards in time – what the literature generally does – is too simple and anachronistic. Both in Germany and Britain the dominating understandings differ from our present day understanding of the ‘welfare state’ as a social security system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Family policies have been expanded in many OECD countries, whilst developments along other welfare state dimensions have been characterized by retrenchment. Although the contribution of gender analyses of the welfare state to a better understanding of family policies is widely acknowledged, the literature so far has largely failed to provide a comparative account explaining the recent expansions of employment-oriented family policies in countries that were previously categorized as pursuing policies in accordance with the strong male breadwinner model. This article aims to make a contribution to the comparative literature by investigating the socioeconomic conditions and politics of employment-oriented family policy expansions in Britain and Germany since the 1990s. We pay special attention to processes of post-industrialisation and especially changed skill compositions as well as the role of key policy actors, with a special focus on organized business. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the EU Presidency plays a more important role than is generally assumed. It is not so much that the incumbent Presidency may try to 'push through' legislation close to the national interests but that it has an important role in fostering the Europeanization of national environmental policy-making. Holding the Presidency creates strong pressures to achieve agreement and fosters a subtle but important learning process about the European and national dimensions of policy problems. This is one of the main reasons why national objectives and 'styles' tend more often to give way to 'European thinking' about environmental policy when the Presidency is held. National differences in running the Presidency become more apparent during informal Councils which do not make decisions directly resulting in legislation. It will be shown that there appears to be little difference overall in the way the British and German governments run their respective Presidencies despite considerable differences in their national 'styles' of environmental policy- making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]