Citizenship in democratic welfare states (original) (raw)
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LECTURE ON THE WELFARE STATE IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE
This lecture will concentrate on the historical evolution and the current realities of the welfare state in contemporary Europe. Both as a concept and as an institution, the welfare state has interacted in space with various other catalysts such as class, gender, ethnicity and 'race'. Therefore, this lecture will also comprise an overview of the various shapes that social exclusion can acquire in contemporary Europe.
In Search of a New Welfare State in Europe: An International Perspective
Modern social policy represents a key component in Europe’s advanced political economies. The European welfare state in the shape and form in which it developed in the second half of the twentieth century represents a unique historical achievement. Never before in history, as Fritz Scharpf puts it, ‘has democratic politics been so effectively used to promote civil liberty, economic growth, social solidarity, and public well-being’ (Scharpf, 2003). The defining feature of the postwar welfare state is that social protection came to be firmly anchored on the explicit normative commitment to grant social rights to citizens in areas of human need (Esping-Andersen, 1994: 712). This implied the expansion of mass education as an instrument for equal opportunities, access to high quality health care for everyone, together with the introduction of a universal right to real income, in T. H. Marshall’s seminal work, Citizenship and Social Class (1950), ‘not proportionate to the market value of the claimant’ (Marshall, 1950: 110). Social citizenship held out a promise of the enlargement, enrichment, and equalization of people's ‘life chances’ (Marshall, 1950: 107). Thus Marshall defined social policy as the use of democratic ‘political power to supersede, supplement, or modify operations of the economic system in order to achieve results which the economic system would not achieve of his own’ (Marshall, 1975: 15). In his first report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Lord Beveridge saw “freedom from want” to be the pivotal objective of the welfare state (Beveridge, 1942). In his 1945 Full Employment in a Free Society, however, Beveridge came to view employment, active participation, or inclusion in productive work as a key function of being an accepted part of a larger collective identity (Beveridge, 1945). In Beveridge’s participatory view on full employment, social citizenship went beyond the right to a decent income, to include right to live from labor, to combine their income with the recognition of a social function. Jobs benefit people by giving them enhanced opportunities for self-actualization, personal identity, self-esteem, and the feeling of belonging to a community. Inclusion through the labor market remains a cornerstone of every policy strategy of social inclusion. Participating in the labor market is today the most important form of social interaction and, as such, is an indispensable element in achieving social cohesion. In the words of Guenther Schmid: “Not being wanted is worse than being poor” (Schmid, 2008: 3).
Key challenges for the European Welfare States
2019
Is the Welfare State sustainable? How has it fared in the last few decades? What are the main challenges facing the Welfare State today and in the near future? This Working paper aims at offering the reader with elements to answer, if temporarily, this questions regarding the present and future of the European Welfare State. With that aim, the paper discusses the evolution on European Welfare States, making emphasis in the contrast between the discourse that has become a common place regarding Welfare State dynamics and its crisis, and the picture shown by the indicators commonly used to measure the size of the Welfare State. Against this background, we review the "old" and "new" challenges faced by Welfare States. This review includes its compatibility with allocative efficiency and economic growth, the impact of globalisation and immigration, the increase in demographic dependency rates related to the growth of life expectancy and the reduction of fertility rat...
Recasting European Welfare States for the 21st Century
European Review, 2000
This article places European welfare states squarely in today's European integration context and looks optimistically at social policy perspectives ‘top down’ from the European level. It has the needs of European policy makers in mind, and thus their interests in optimal policy mixes, lessons from national experiences and in a new institutional architecture that links EU member states more effectively into All-European corridors of reform efforts. The authors argue that the overriding need in welfare state reform is to identify new value combinations and institutional arrangements in national systems that are both mixed – in terms of solidarity and growth objectives – and virtuous, that is capable of producing advances on all necessary fronts. The authors recapitulate the EU's present social agenda – where the search for ‘new value combinations’ is seen to be most actively undertaken. They take up the nature of the ‘bottom up’ challenges to, and the adjustment problems of, t...
2007
Introduction: the welfare state under global pressures The postwar Keynesian welfare state in Europe was sustainable as long as postwar European economies were growing and were relatively closed; however, over the years, as entitlements grew ever bigger and coverage became ever more universal, the proportion of GDP spent on public services rose considerably. With economies becoming more open, the stagnation which started in the second half of the seventies in Europe, following the oil crisis, was perhaps the first symptom that the welfare system in the form designed for one period (the postwar reconstruction of Europe) might be not be working in a different period. 1 In 1960, the average expenditure on social payments was 7.5 percent of gross domestic product in the affluent countries of Western Europe, as compared to 6 percent being spent in the United States. Already by 1980, though, the average expenditure on social payments in Europe had doubled and reached a level of 14 percent of GDP, while the United States was spending only 9.75 percent. The differencial between the USA and European countries was growing (Myles and Quadagno 2002: 34). As a result the social agenda of the eighties and nineties changed radically: after the policies of the golden age of expansion, European welfare states have been shaped by the (Paul Pierson's) "politics of austerity". Consequently, the rhetoric of a "crisis" in the welfare state has been with us since the 1970s. From the 1970s, various theorists have claimed a fiscal crisis, a crisis of government overload, a crisis of liberal democracy or, as Jürgen Habermas called it, a "crisis of legitimacy". 2 Social scientists have divergent views about the causes of the current pressures on the welfare state; they agree on a single point though; we are facing the end of the welfare state as we know it. Let me quote here three diagnoses leading in a similar direction:
Farewell to Welfare: An End to Citizenship as We Know It
2016
The crisis of the welfare state has been a widely discussed topic since at least the 1970s both in the social sciences and in political debate. It is not my intention to readdress it or to analyze the many diagnoses of the meaning and scope of the crisis: there is a huge amount of literature on this and I do not aim to add another contribution. Rather I would like to investigate the reasons that led to the wide acceptance among the public in Western Europe (and probably elsewhere) of the dismantling of certain features of the welfare state. To this end, I shall focus on the discourses that justified this process and that have provided a major shift in the political vocabulary from the grammar of (social) rights to the grammar of performance and (state) services. In other words, I shall concentrate on the paradigm change from a Keynesian model of welfare state to a ‘neoliberal’ model of personal responsibility. This change of paradigm threatens the very idea of citizenship as we have...