Welfare Reform

Abstract

Abstract Convergence is a keyword of European monetary union. At least since the Maastricht ‘convergence criteria’, EMU’s sponsors have pressed for national economic policies and performance to become more similar across Europe. Moreover, EMU seemed to rest on convergence towards a particular substantive orthodox vision, focused on stable, sustainable public finances and sound money, with the welfare state typically depicted as burden. In contrast, Martin Rhodes’s striking and provocative ‘welfare state’ chapter for European States and the Euro suggested that EMU might prove ‘good’ for the welfare states, emphasizing EMU’s (perhaps paradoxical) potential to strengthen both states’ welfare capacities (focusing particularly on ‘social pacts’) and EU-level policy coordination, thereby ‘re-embedding’ European liberalism rather than imposing neo-liberalism. Rhodes (2002: 309) also hinted that today’s welfare state was best understood from a revisionist perspective on post-war embedded liberalism, or the ‘Keynesian welfare state’. Particularly in its third section, this chapter re-addresses these questions in the light of the implementation and operation of EMU—as well as EU enlargement—and asks whether this subsequent experience has caused European welfare states to converge.