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Chapter 3 turns to the analysis of case-law development. The overlapping nature of EU and domestic legal orders, coupled with the great material detail in the EU Treaty, leads to a state of legal uncertainty concerning the reach of EU law. Some private actors benefit from drawing on this supranational, alternative legal setting. The interpretation of the four freedoms and citizenship shows that legal uncertainty about the Treaty’s ever-broader scope is embedded in a path-dependent interpretation of rights. Principles established in one area are transferred to other areas, as most private actors perceive there to be benefits from such a transfer and legitimize their claims through established principles. Legal uncertainty and path dependence appear contradictory, but they are helpful concepts for understanding how the Court can further the stability and predictability of European law while giving new incentives for further integration.

This chapter provides a narrative of the complex origins of the American Exceptionalism in health care and the main impediments to the realization of health care as a social right afforded to all Americans. As the chapter discusses, at the heart of American Exceptionalism in health care is “The Great Unsustainable Compromise”, that is, a fragmented mixed-public and private system of health care finance and delivery that has been built around a subsidized employment-based insurance system with selective entitlements to health care for the poor and aged. After tracing the development of the Great Unsustainable Compromise from the demise of the Truman Plan in the late 1940's at the behest of the American Medical Association through the enactment of the Medicare and Medicaid entitlements in 1965, the chapter explains the seeds of its demise and its gradually unraveling over the final decades of the 20th century. In its concluding section, the chapter advances the arguments for the inevitability of the evolvement of the health care system to a publicly financed universal entitlement to comprehensive health care as a social right of citizenship.

The chapter takes issue with a tendency for polar juxtapositions in the industrial relations literature on how internationalization affects domestic trade union practices. Instead of drawing a dichotomy between ‘convergence’ and ‘path dependence’, the chapter highlights that internationalization made these practices more similar in some respects, while it simultaneously contributed to the re-creation (rather than the mere reproduction) of diversity between and within the two countries.

This chapter considers the impact of “Thatcherism” and “Reaganomics” and the extent to which the British and American states were restructured during the 1980s. It argues that despite the neoliberal project the state proved largely resistant to long-run shrinkage. It suggests, furthermore, that some of the gradual change mechanisms that were employed by policymakers in this period did not always create lasting or sustained institutional shifts.