Towards a modern social (welfare) formation?

Abstract

It is often argued that European welfare states and Asian developmental states are the most successful state forms in recent history. The first is a late 19th century European invention although it has over the 20th century spread to other parts of the world, not least East Asia and more recently throughout South and Southeast Asia where the heuristic Nordic welfare model has thrived. However, in the last two or three decades the idea of the egalitarian and democratic welfare state has been foreign to the dominant mode of global thinking about the organisation of society and state. The global consensus approach has regarded state intervention in the market economy – growth-supporting measures (even planning), heavy taxes, generous welfare benefits, increased public responsibility including anti-corruptive measures – as fundamentally flawed and against the long-term viability of a free and open society. This is also where the most recent globalisation theories have met the most prevalent theories in comparative welfare state research without taking into account other types of secular and non-secular thoughts. In this article the societal experience of late modernity – or the epoch of the Spectacle – in the Far North of Europe is explored in the context of welfare state building and re-building; at the end the appeal of this model in Korea is briefly examined.