Approaching the EU and Reaching the US? Rival Narratives on Transforming Welfare Regimes in East-Central Europe

Abstract

Post-communist welfare regimes are frequently portrayed as a hybrid consisting of the relics of communist social policy and a neophyte imitation of the US model of welfare. Both components of that hybrid are regarded as incompatible with the 'European social model'. At the same time, most welfare reformers in East-Central Europe try to avoid falling into the trap of first, conserving the statist, inefficient and pseudo-egalitarian character of the old system of social policy; second, seeking new forms of welfare collectivism along the national-conservative/populist 'third roads' between capitalism and communism; third, triggering popular discontent by dismantling the old welfare regimes too rapidly, or in a haphazard way; and fourth, targeting an end-state which has become unsustainable in the Western world during the past two decades. Meanwhile, the emerging welfare regimes in the region are far from being identical and the reformers do not find stable institutional arrangements in the West to copy. In an effort to make sense of this complex picture, the paper examines what has 'really' happened in the welfare sectors in the region during the past decade by presenting three dominant narratives of the social transformation: 'leaping in the dark', 'marking time' and 'muddling through'.