National Welfare State Research Articles

National eco-social policies in the framework of EU just transition: The cases of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain

This article examines two questions. First, how far have the green and social policy objectives of the European Green Deal and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) been translated into ‘eco-social policies’ (i.e. demonstrate a ‘socio-ecological’ dimension) in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of four of the biggest beneficiary countries, namely, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain? And, second, how is the role of national welfare states articulated in these eco-social policies to support this just green transition? Our analysis shows first, that, although the analysed NRRPs have a socio-ecological dimension, this is very limited in terms of the share of ‘eco-social’ measures in the total number of policy measures in the NRRPs. Moreover, we find that the role of national welfare states in the identified eco-social policies of the NRRPs in the four country-cases we examine is significantly tilted in favour of what we call ‘benchmarking’ and ‘enabling’ functions, in contrast to what we call ‘buffering’ and ‘consensus-building’ functions. In that sense, the socio-ecological dimension of these national plans seems ‘unbalanced’ in terms of the functions that national welfare states play in it. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of these findings for the role of EU policy legacies and frameworks and of national welfare states in shaping the emergence of eco-social policies as means to a just green transition and on some methodological challenges for the study of eco-social policies in the context of the European Green Deal and its implementation.

Shifting the gaze on welfare-state sustainability in Norway: a proposal for a relational global view

Norway is an excellent case for studying the ambiguities and competing interests attached to climate change and global sustainability. The country is at the forefront in the use of “clean energy,” yet has long been one of the world’s largest oil exporters and its dominant ideas have been challenged given the climate-change crisis. The article offers a preliminary review of the historical and current connections that exist between the development of national welfare states in Europe (and Norway in particular) and the long-standing practice of extractivist efforts that have harmed nature in indigenous lands within Norwegian borders and colonized, or previously colonized lands, outside Europe). As a comparative exercise, this article mobilizes the idea of social imaginaries to conceptualize and explore how the Norwegian welfare state has, in the social policy literature and in public discourse, been linked to the notion of sustainability, given the context of rapid climate change. By drawing on three illustrative cases, the article demonstrates how such imaginaries are present in current discussions. It suggests that unpacking such imaginaries within a historical and relational global view may contribute to understanding the role of nationalism and colonialism in Norway’s sustainability narratives, to potentially trigger change in the way we conceptualize welfare-state sustainability.

Transnational professionalism in child welfare in Germany

The field of child protection is closely interwoven with the national welfare state and its institutions. Nowadays, both the everyday lives of families and the professional work are shaped by transnational activities. This article presents the results of a study on child protection services in Germany working across national borders. Although regulated by international law, there are institutional and organisational gaps challenging professionals in this field. We can find processes of border setting and border crossing by professional social workers at the same time. Two ideal types of transnational situations are presented that reflect the variations of professional activities.

Towards a Re-insurance union? SURE as an EU response to preserve jobs in the COVID-19 pandemic

Is the EU evolving towards a Re-Insurance Union? The creation of SURE, an EU financial tool to support national short-time work (STW) schemes in the midst of the pandemic, has revitalized debates on fiscal stabilizers as a means to counter economic downturns and protect jobs within the European Union. Drawing from document analyses and 17 interviews with EU and national stakeholders, this study explores the politics underpinning SURE’s adoption following a decade of heated and unsuccessful debates on the European Unemployment Reinsurance Scheme (EURS). Through the lens of ‘purposeful opportunism’, the article illustrates how the European Commission leveraged prior EURS insights and the emerging consensus on STW schemes to craft SURE in a way which addressed national concerns about EU-wide welfare harmonization, while positioning the EU as a holding environment for national welfare states. Looking ahead, making SURE a permanent ‘second line of defence’ against macroeconomic shocks could contribute to further substantiating new, EU-wide, social rights codified in the European Pillar of Social Rights.

The Welfare State: The Challenges of Sustainability

It is nothing new that ‘the welfare state’ faces serious challenges. Ever since the 1970s, Western welfare states have by many researchers been regarded as being in crisis, but despite many policy adjustments and important variations among Western welfare states, the overall scope of the welfare state, as measured by social expenditure per capita, has by and large increased. At the same time, we can observe a globalization of social policy and the emergence of a more active social role of the state in many parts of the world during recent decades. But new challenges due to a variety of new security issues and new dimensions of uncertainty have appeared, not least following the unanticipated Russian large-scale invasion of and war on Ukraine and concomitant international political developments. Political unease about the future of the welfare state and scope of social policies in different parts of the world has escalated. Welfare political priorities must compete with increased priorities for defense, cyber security, and issues related to energy, climate, food, and the environment. Motivations for state responsibility for citizen welfare and well-being – as well as for the type and scope of responsibility - vary. The fate of the welfare state and social policies is clearly a question of political and normative commitment to what kind of socially active state is desired. The paper addresses the following topics: Why should a state be socially active? What were historical reasons for developing welfare states? What are current motivations for developing and maintaining welfare states? What are the economic, political, and moral dimensions of welfare state sustainability? In addition to possible national political responses to social challenges, it is argued that in a globalized world reinforced international cooperation, coordination and regulation may be necessary to achieve sustainability of (national) welfare states.

The Danish Economy, 1973–2009: From National Welfare State to International Market Economy

ABSTRACT A number of long-term trends in the Danish economy changed around 1973. The decades before were characterized by the establishment of a welfare state with a high level of social security and an optimistic attitude to public planning. Many periods during the subsequent decades have witnessed a struggle against different specific economic problems, including how to pay for the welfare state. But the whole period since 1973 has been characterized by an overall movement from a national welfare state to a more international and market-oriented economy. The development can be divided into four separate phases based on changes in government and different policies: 1973–1982 is characterized by escalating economic problems, 1982–93 with an improvement in the macroeconomic balance except in employment, and 1993–2001 with a highly successful improvement, including in employment. During the period 2001–2009 the government did not show the same willingness to make reforms, but this period’s liberal-conservative government is the symbol of the transformation to a market economy.

Buffering national welfare states in hard times: The politics of EU capacity‐building in the social policy domain

AbstractThe EU has traditionally influenced the social and employment policies of Member States through regulation, leaving redistribution to national welfare states. The latter have, however, been gradually weakened by global socioeconomic change and by the expansion of EU market integration. A series of crises over the last 15 years made a bad situation worse: the longue durée erosion of the capacity of European welfare states has morphed into acute social aftershocks, especially in peripheral countries. After the austerity reflex in the early 2010s, the EU introduced new policy instruments with market‐correcting rationales that go beyond the regulatory approach. This article revisits the creation and functioning of four of these instruments that represent EU‐level capacity‐building in the social policy domain: the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, the Youth Guarantee, the Just Transition Fund and SURE (the temporary Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency). We argue that the EU increasingly provides ‘buffer mechanisms’ to support stressed national welfare states in tasks they would otherwise be unable to accomplish, and we identify the political factors that drive the expansion of this ‘buffering’ logic in EU social policy.

Challenges as a Driving Force for the Modernization of Social Statehood in Europe

One of the most significant social achievements of the twentieth century was the development and implementation of the welfare state concept within the framework of the theory of a democratic, rule-of-law state which ensures the best option for social and economic development, as well as political stability in society. It is proved that although, since the 1970s, some economists, political scientists and lawyers have periodically sharply criticized the concept of the welfare State, predicting its decline, the positive results of its transformation in European countries, as well as the development of the European Social Community within the European Union, show that the welfare State has a chance not only to survive, but also to remain one of the fundamental principles of statehood in democratic countries, and an element of the supranational organization of power embodied in the European Union.The purpose of the article is to analyze the traditional and new challenges to the welfare state which determine the change of approaches to its functioning and priorities at the current stage of development of state-legal and interstate (integration) relations.The key idea that structures the study is the thesis that European states that form a united Europe or aspire to join it, such as Ukraine, despite belonging to the same civilizational community, retain the right to choose how to respond to the economic, social, demographic, migration, environmental and climate challenges of our time. This choice determines the future of national welfare state models. In accordance with the stated goal, the article identifies two groups of major challenges: established (demographic changes, in particular, population aging; changes in the position of women in society and in the labor market; changes in the labor market; poverty and social exclusion) and new (rapid growth of emigration of Ukrainian doctors and nurses; introduction of artificial intelligence technologies; uncontrolled mass immigration; rapid growth of disability in society) faced by the welfare state and, mainly, the social security system, which is its foundation. While the established challenges require adjustments to the priorities and tasks of the welfare state, the newest ones require a significant modernization of the welfare state, adapting it to the new political, economic and social conditions of society.Further research on the selected issues should be conducted taking into account the existence of certain models of the welfare state that unite European states either by geographical (Scandinavian, continental, Anglo-Saxon, Southern European) or ideological (liberal, conservative, social democratic, corporate, solidarity) criteria.The problem of the welfare state's response to the challenges of environmental and climate crises deserves separate development, and in the context of this consideration, the correlation between the social and environmental (“green”) state.

Boundaries of Belonging: The Welfare State in the Wake of Decolonisation

Over the course of the 1970s, Europe reckoned with the after-effects of decolonisation – a transformative process in world history that not only led to the movement of millions of people from the former colonies, but also threw into question European economic and cultural hegemony. The three articles in this forum investigate different ways Europe remade itself in response to the unmaking of European imperialism. All three demonstrate that Europe radically redrew the boundaries of belonging over the course of the 1970s, either by limiting access to national welfare states for migrants and former colonial subjects, by crafting a new form of international welfare state that was less focused on the redistribution of wealth, or by ‘Europeanising’ fossil fuel production so as to insulate the continent from the economic power of the so-called Third World.

The transformation of European welfare states and its implications for social work (research): staying on the tanker or choosing a small sloop?

Since the conception of post-war national welfare states and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the notions of citizenship and of civic, political and social rights were institutionalised in European welfare states. In that vein, a social work workforce acquired a professional and public mandate to implement social policies. During recent decades, however, welfare state arrangements seem to have moved in another direction. The premise that the welfare state is responsible for social protection and the redistribution of resources has subtly shifted into one of an active welfare state, with a stronger focus on individual responsibility and conditionality. In addition, welfare state arrangements have been based on the premise of a territorial logic of the nation state, making it more difficult for migrants to access services. In this article, we first discuss the transformation of welfare state arrangements. We then make use of an exemplary case, namely, the emergence of new social work practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, to illustrate the current positioning of social work practice. In the final part, we critically tease out the changing role of social work and social work research in these circumstances.

'Protecting the NHS' - and its limits

There are limits in articulating political struggles around the NHS and the imagined geographies of the nation: struggles based on nostalgia for the post-war welfare state risk co-opting the NHS for an exclusionary, nationalist politics. In tracing the times and spaces of the health service the article asks: when was the NHS? and where is the NHS? The idea of universal healthcare - and changing ideas of nation, state and welfare - are articulated in particular political conjunctures. The whereabouts of the NHS is more than a question of devolution and territorial politics in an increasingly disunited Kingdom; there are also questions of borders, and of workers who are trained and drawn into the NHS from overseas: it is impossible to imagine the NHS without grappling with the ways in which colonialism is integral to the formation of the post-war national welfare state. As both a residual of the national welfare state, and as an emergent site of political and cultural work, the NHS is continuously reworked within dominant politics; while it also offers an emotionally powerful political resource to galvanise popular public support that resists such tendencies. We therefore insist on the need to get to grips with the complex and partial embedding of private interests and market logics within the organisation of healthcare - often framed, rather crudely, in terms of the 'Americanisation' of the NHS. But we also warn of the analytical limits, and political dangers, of framing political struggles around national spatial imaginaries when seeking to 'protect' the NHS in these times of crisis.

Free movement and access to social security in the EU: The challenge of exporting unemployment benefits

The freedom of movement of EU workers and access to national welfare state systems has become a controversial topic among policymakers in recent years. To understand this, the article analyses the positions of Western European states towards the proposal of the European Commission to reform the European social security coordination. The structural problems of this reform and the current Regulation (EC) 883/2004 can be seen in the discussion on the export of unemployment benefits. Although Western European states have similar insurance-based and comprehensive unemployment systems, they have conflicting views on this issue. The article presents a comparative case study of Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. Data was generated via expert interviews and policy documents and analysed through institutionalist approaches. By tracing the debates on the export of unemployment benefits, the article makes a more general argument about the debate on the free movement of workers and social security in the EU. It explains that policymakers’ main concern is not only the financial burden on their welfare systems, but also that the current Regulation (EC) 883/2004 and the reform proposal are incompatible with national monitoring and enforcement systems, which are designed to work best when the worker is in the Member State of last employment. This incompatibility of the coordination rules with national rules creates opposition among policymakers to the access of EU workers to national welfare systems.

Rediscovering Revolutionary Socialism in America:


 
 
 This article examines the pre-World War I editorials of America’s first Socialist con- gressman, Victor Berger, in order to recover the lost history of early twentieth-century American socialism from the obscuring lenses of Progressivism, Populism, anarchism, scientism, Soviet Communism, and American Exceptionalism. As I argue, talk of a Second Gilded Age today overlooks the vastly different roles “socialism” has played in the respective discourses. Rather than fighting for a stronger national welfare state, even the most conservative Socialists like Wisconsin Representative Victor Berger campaigned for the abolition of wage labour and the overthrow of global capitalism. Recognizing Populism’s failure to preserve its political independence as a working-class movement, Berger, like Debs, proposed that the working class should organize itself under the banner of a socialist party to take state power. In order to link the forma- tion of mass parties like the Socialist Party of America to a totalizing philosophy of history and international political revolution, Berger drew from Second-International Marxist dialogue in which it was enmeshed, not indigenous American traditions. The prolific editorial career of Victor Berger, head of the largest English-language socialist daily in the country, demonstrates how pre-war American Socialists did not merely “translate” Second-International Marxism but rather made up a constitutive part of its transatlantic development.
 
 

Delivering on the European Pillar of Social Rights: Towards a needs‐based distribution of the European social funds?

AbstractThrough the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD), the European Union (EU) acts as a ‘material supporter’ of national welfare states. Remarkably, the European Social Fund Plus, integrating ESF and FEAD, is presented as the main financial instrument to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR). This raises the question of what these levers can do in terms of financial support, especially for Member States with greater social needs. By using the Social Scoreboard indicators that monitor the implementation of the EPSR, we analyse the size and distribution of ESF and FEAD according to Member States' economic capacity, social needs and efforts required to meet the European social goals. We find that the funds benefit relatively more the poorer Member States who also tend to have greater social needs. However, especially for ESF, there are significant deviations from this general pattern. Some countries consistently receive less funding than others with similar levels of social needs, and vice versa. Moreover, if, from the perspective of upward convergence, the budgets are expressed as a percentage of the efforts required to lift all income‐poor citizens to the EU‐wide at‐risk‐of‐poverty threshold, countries who need to make the greatest efforts receive less funding. These outcomes are partly driven by the funds' allocation rules, which give only little importance to the great social discrepancies between countries. This raises the question whether social needs should be taken more into account in the distribution of the funds.

A Flanking European Welfare State: The European Community's Social Dimension, from Brandt to Delors (1969–1993)

Between 1969 and 1993, a genuine ‘European welfare state’ was forged at the level of the European Economic Community (EEC), even though this expression was not used per se. After a definition of the welfare state as a three-pronged set of policies, the article develops first the flourishing period in the 1970s, when many ambitious ideas such as a common reduction of working hours, or the control of multinationals, emerged. In a second step, it explains the failure of this project due to the neoliberal backlash of the early 1980s and the division of the welfarist coalition. Ultimately, the whole project was rekindled as a flanking wing of the internal market programme when the latter was launched in 1985. Hence, when the internal market opened up in 1993, a very unique kind of European welfare existed at the international level. It was less redistributive than that of national welfare states and more geared towards the management of common norms.

A theory of informal and formal social citizenship and welfare

AbstractFormal social citizenship is limited in how it enables us to think about informal social citizenship and informal welfare. This informal perspective is important in all contexts where access to social rights is negotiated through local and transnational spaces, and where the state is a relatively minor player. By drawing on work on moral economy (Scott, 1976) and informal welfare (Gough and Wood, 2006) the article aims to propose a new theoretical model to understand the nature and social practice of both informal citizenship and welfare. This model departs from a western-centric understanding of nation-state-based citizenship and national welfare states, adopting instead the perspective that informal social citizenship and welfare have existed independently of the nation state as long as there have been human communities. Formal citizenship together with formal welfare rights represent just one particular crystallization of such informal practice. Our proposed model highlights the interdependent (rather than evolutionary) relationship between formal welfare at national level and informal welfare practices at local and transnational levels.

Social innovation and public service: A literature review of multi-actor collaborative approaches in five European countries

Governments increasingly tend to involve or rely on various societal actors to address social challenges and develop cost-effective and high-quality public services. This paper identifies the major themes of social innovation relating to this type of collaborative governance, by carrying out a conceptual analysis of the scientific and grey literature on social innovation in five European countries. Depending on the country, different emphases of social innovation are found. One theme that appears common to all countries is social entrepreneurship. This paper provides a mapping of these major themes on social innovation. It discusses the nexus of collaborative governance and social innovation by theme, and the impact that the history of the national welfare state has on social innovation initiatives and forms of collaborative governance.

Higher education in welfare regimes: Three worlds of post-Soviet transition

Higher education has generally been excluded from the welfare discourse, especially in transition countries. This article addresses existing research gaps by applying the ideas of decommodification and stratification to higher education in post-Soviet countries, within the comparative framework of welfare regime typology. The purpose of this study is to analyse the extent to which higher education relates to welfare state models in such countries. The research demonstrates that institutional settings and outcomes of higher education provision in Estonia, Georgia and Russia are evolving toward patterns of social-democratic, liberal and conservative models, respectively. Although the correspondence is incomplete, we argue that post-Soviet states are more similar to groups of countries representing these welfare regimes than to each other. This study argues against the assumption of a uniform post-Soviet pattern of higher education policy and shows that its structuring is embedded in the wider context of national welfare state models.

Transnational Solidarity Within the EU: Public Support for Risk-Sharing and Redistribution

This paper aims to discover underlying, as yet theoretically and empirically unexplored, distinctions in citizens’ views of transnational solidarity within the European Union (EU). Building on literature regarding national welfare states, the paper presents an original concept of transnational solidarity consisting of two latent, not directly measurable, dimensions: first, citizens’ preferences for risk-sharing among EU states and, second, their preferences for intra-EU redistribution. The diverse types of transnational solidarity examined in previous research should be assignable to either one or the other dimension. Moreover, previous research is based on the idea that the concept of transnational solidarity is comparable across EU countries; however, this premise has not been empirically examined so far. To test both these assumptions, I analyze data collected in Austria, Germany, and Greece in 2019 or 2020. The study runs multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to test whether the presented concept of transnational solidarity (a) applies and (b) is comparable between these nations. The empirical analysis supports both these assumptions. The populations of the three countries share the same understanding of transnational solidarity even though the willingness to express cross-country risk-sharing and redistribution varies significantly between the states. The study contributes to current research in the fields of European integration, political sociology, and survey methodology.

Repoliticising national policy mobilities: Resisting the Americanization of universal healthcare

Policy mobilities scholarship has comprehensively challenged the methodological nationalism and rational orthodoxies of policy studies. Contributing to recent debates on policy mobilities and post-politics, this paper examines how struggles over the ‘national’ shape policy on the move. Focussing on attempts to embed accountable care models across the English National Health Service (NHS), I consider how ‘integration’ has been mobilised as a seemingly irresistible solution to the failures of market-orientated healthcare reforms in times of austerity. Yet, I foreground how campaigners slowed down the local contracting of accountable care through repoliticising circulating policy as the ‘Americanization’ of the NHS. The paper emphasises the ongoing, yet shifting and politically contested, role of the state and national spatial imaginaries in the making and translating of globally mobile policy. Rethinking the times and spaces of politics and policy in the current conjuncture, I conclude by warning of the limits of nostalgia for the post-war national welfare state when pushing for universal healthcare as a right for all.