Retrenching, recalibrating, pre-distributing. The welfare state facing old and new inequalities

Abstract

The paper discusses two of the main ideational frameworks - social investment and transitional labor markets - that have been developed to counter both the neo-liberal critique of the welfare state and the weakening of its historical bases, focusing in particular on whether and how they address the issue of socially structured inequalities. It argues that they address only marginally the issue of growing inequality and its causes and that this limitation is partly due to their theoretical approach, partly to the fact that inequality must be tackled not only ex post, through redistribution, but ex ante, intervening at the sources of its formation and reproduction, thus at the pre-distributive level. This perspective, however, needs overcoming national boundaries that have been already weakened by market globalization and migration movements, which have partly undermined individual countries’ ability to circumscribe and fund their welfare state.