Concluding Considerations: Are Southerners Becoming More European than Southern?

Abstract

The argument put forward in this book is that the welfare systems of Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain share all the basic institutional characteristics of the ‘state-corporatist’ welfare model. As mentioned in Chapter 1, this type of welfare state is a ‘distribution state’, mainly financed by the contributions of employers and employees in work-based insurance schemes and characterised by social transfers in cash, related to earnings; the entitlement to social rights is founded on someone’s social status and work performance. However, the overall underdevelopment of the welfare state in the aforementioned Southern European countries, together with a number of similarities in their social structures and economic trajectories, clearly classifies them in a distinctive sub-category of the above model. In other words, the ‘Southerners’ represent a distinct group, a variant within the family of the Continental welfare states. The four countries share some characteristics, such as similar structures of social and economic development, the relative inefficiency of the social protection systems and some comparable social and family structures. Despite these similarities, we argue that two clusters are discernible even within the group of the Southern European countries, one consisting of the Iberian countries and the other of Italy and Greece. Their different historical traditions and economic trajectories, and the dissimilar weight of patronage and clientelism, which is much stronger in the latter two countries, are amongst the main factors of this differentiation. Of course, many factors of differentiation exist even within these clusters.