Abstract
The European welfare state is in a state of crisis. On the surface it faces severe fiscal and political challenges. More fundamentally, however, it is a crisis of identity. The driving forces and conceptual framework that led to the growth of the European welfare state were very much products of socialist and liberal notions steeped in the modern era. If it is the case—as this text argues—that these ideas and ideals are becoming obsolete, then the welfare state is in need of a new justification.
Keywords
Introduction
It is an often-proclaimed fact that the modern welfare state was conceived and implemented in the 1880s by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and is thus an invention inspired by conservative ideals. Yet it was a complex set of factors that motivated his propositions. Part of Bismarck's rhetoric focused on Christian responsibility for exposed workers, but the primary motivation was economic—to promote industrial growth and stem the tide of German migrants to America—and the secondary one was a growing concern for socialist trends in Germany at the time.
Obviously, a rudimentary welfare state had already long been a feature of some Western societies in the sense that communities provided poverty relief through taxation. What was truly modern about Bismarck's idea was the notion that the state should also provide security for people not in immediate despair, in the form of health, accident and unemployment insurances, and an old age pension. Thus entered the concept of a universal welfare state, where the state is central to the well-being of all its citizens, from cradle to grave.
It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, however, that the modern welfare state assumed its most defining trait, that is, its vastness in terms of purpose and share of the economy. In most European countries social security more than doubled its share of the total economy during the first 15 years following the Second World War. Simultaneously, programmes intended to influence behavioural patterns in the population began to emerge as a vital aspect of the welfare state's commitment to enforcing equality and contesting oppressive prejudices, that is, racism, anti-Semitism and unjustified gender discrimination.
There were four main reasons for this rapid growth. First, the Great Depression instilled a sense of popular and political urgency for the welfare state. Second, the increasingly authoritative academic discipline of economics provided the welfare state with a theoretical foundation. Third, unprecedented economic growth after the war made such a project possible without societies having to sacrifice private-sector profits and rising real wages. Fourth, different ideological arguments for the modern welfare state had matured and percolated in an ongoing philosophical, political and cultural discourse dominated by themes related to social engineering.
Taken together, these four perspectives motivated the rise of the welfare state from a number of different angles and guaranteed that there would always be reasons for further welfare reforms, regardless of which political faction happened to be in power. At the same time, the disparity of ideological origin, the variety of technical realisations and the different national traditions, make it difficult to speak at all of the European welfare state. A deeper understanding of the relations between individual welfare, capitalism and the state therefore requires an analytical approach.
Twenty-two years ago Esping-Andersen (1990) presented what has become the standard categorisation for the different models of the welfare state. He observed three fundamentally different ways of organising the welfare state according to political–ideological qualities. First, there is the social democratic welfare state. It is closely tied to the nation state, and aims to liberate citizens from market and tradition. Second, there is the liberal welfare state, with its reliance on market forces, where the state functions as a guarantor for basic needs. Third, is the conservative welfare state, with its emphasis on civil society and subsidiarity for social insurances.
Esping-Andersen's model focuses on political purpose and actual outcome, and has functioned well as a heuristic tool for academics (Ferrera 2008). I would like to propose a different perspective, constructed not from politics and outcomes, but rather from the conceptual driving forces behind the emergence and growth of the welfare state. Importantly, the conceptualisation of the modern welfare state would not have been possible without a new visualisation of the scope of politics, and even a new metaphysics with respect to the essence of man and society. An interesting question will be to what extent these underlying factors still play a role in our current understanding of man and society. Obviously, conceptualisation and metaphysical assumptions are not static features, and their shifting dynamics will, over time, have profound effects on how society is organised, whether by design or through organic growth. If it is the case that the conceptual driving forces behind the growth of the modern welfare state are weakening or changing, then it is difficult to see how this will not, over time, have consequences for the core concept itself.
My representation will by nature be vague in its contours, as it builds on an interpretation of the history of ideas in the traditional sense of deriving ideas from the context of an array of cultural phenomena. I will limit myself to the liberal and social democratic constructions of the welfare state. In part this is because the promotion and implementation of the welfare state, while initiated by conservative ideals and motivations, have been driven by liberal and social democratic ideas and political forces. It is also because I personally believe that the conservative motives for social welfare—charity and economic growth—are not part of the crises that have fallen upon the project of the welfare state. If anything, they have been vindicated.
The conceptual origin of the modern welfare state
According to Esping-Andersen, the liberal welfare state ideally relies on market forces. In some cases this may be correct, but here Esping-Andersen essentially makes an observation marked by the fallacy of prescience. His point of departure is liberalism's classic free-market features, and when he finds a society that combines the free market with welfare-state mechanisms, he labels it a liberal welfare state. Consequently, the US is categorised as a prototypical liberal welfare state, when the fact is that the political forces behind social welfare in the US consist of a mix of social democratic (e.g. New Deal) and conservative (e.g. Theodore Roosevelt) elements. The motives for classical liberalism—negative rights and economic liberty—have little or nothing to do with the actual liberal driving forces behind the welfare state. Rather, the liberal welfare state was motivated by a dual emphasis on positive rights and education.
If we analytically break down the liberal argument for the modern welfare state, it goes like this: Liberalism first views the state as an instrument to enforce positive rights. Second, it takes everyone's equal right to develop his or her full potential literally (instead of viewing it as an ideal). Lastly, it follows that no new government programme can ever be anything more than a step in the right direction.
Education reforms (though for practical purposes they intersect with positive rights reforms) have been given their own justification, namely, to liberate citizens from ignorance and prejudice, thereby creating the enlightened citizen on whom an open society purportedly depends. Tightly knit (notably religious) communities, rather than poor ones, have always been regarded as a primary source of the sort of prejudice that a liberal welfare state aims to combat. This has, at times, created stark conflicts between civil society and the liberal welfare state, further inflamed by the liberal tendency to focus exclusively on individual and state at the expense of all that goes on between these abstract levels.
This conceptual and ideological shift emerges from a hyper-modernisation of Enlightenment ideals, and generates entirely different mechanisms from the market forces described in Esping-Andersen's liberal welfare state. Instead of economism and the market, the actual driving forces behind the liberal welfare state came to essentially consist of the Enlightenment's radically new view of man—with its emphasis on individualism, self-fulfilment and rationality—in a merger with the technocratic nation-building ideals of the late modern era. The result is a deeply theory-laden pragmatism regarding education and equal rights. Individuals are seen essentially as unfulfilled rational automatons, a view of man that almost inevitably leads to universal education reforms as a necessary, moral imperative. These reformative ideals similarly entail an injunction to provide a societal environment where a growing number of positive rights can be realised. In conjunction with the scientistic concept of society as a machine guided by underlying forces—much like Newton's physical universe—and an unconstrained self-confidence with respect to man's competence as a capable engineer in manipulating the societal machine, it is frankly difficult to see how a project along the lines of the modern welfare state could not have been attempted. Free markets—Esping Andersen's hallmark feature for the liberal welfare state—do not even enter the equation. In accordance with liberalism's innate utopian tendencies, free markets and unregulated trade cannot be allowed until the rational individual has been created and allowed full access to his or her inner potential. Freedom, the argument goes, is in all its forms and shapes contingent on a personal sense of responsibility and competence as a citizen. Hence, in order for the liberal societal order to succeed, education—in the broadest sense of the term—becomes the first priority. The liberal welfare state becomes a powerful tool to this end, and includes not only the educational system proper, but also tax incentives, regulations and even laws to guide behaviour and form opinions.
Similarly, Esping-Andersen's description fails to account for the driving forces behind the social democratic welfare state. He portrays the social democratic welfare state as a liberation from the constraints of market forces and confining tradition. There is, however, little evidence that Social Democratic parties, once in power, have ever wanted to eliminate market forces. On the contrary, Social Democratic policy in Europe during its prime was entwined with two market-friendly observations, which largely shaped its approach to the welfare-state project. First, there was the insight that a business-friendly environment was necessary to create the financial basis for welfare reform, and hence to secure the voter base. Second, the close ties between social democracy and trade unions created a path to welfare reform that depended on, rather than conflicted with, market forces.
Further indication that social democracy does not include any essential opposition to market forces as a vehicle for social welfare can be seen in its pragmatic reaction to private and for-profit initiatives in the health care industry, schooling system and so on. While there is ample evidence that social democracy continuously insists that the state must guarantee, and to some extent channel, social welfare, it also often exhibits an acceptance of the private sector as a provider of social services.
Historically, these aspects of the social democratic project stood at the centre of its conflict with non-reformist socialists, and highlight the fact that it was the very opposite of the feature that Esping-Andersen marks as defining the social democratic welfare state—anti-market—that really distinguished it from more radical leftish movements. To understand the motivation for the rise of social democracy one should look not to its methods, but to its fundamental purpose: the distribution of wealth through incorporating new parts of the economy into the public sphere—in this, early social democracy did not separate itself from the radical movement.
The revolutionary idea that wealth should be redistributed by the state, and that private property rights be contingent on their functions in the economy, follows, in part, from a shift in perspective from civil society to the state. Interestingly, this shift is mirrored in liberalism's struggle to create the perfect circumstances for individuals. In effect liberalism and socialism will, from different perspectives, prepare similar structural support for a universal welfare state—both will regard civil society a hindrance, either as a suffocating structure for individual liberty or as a wealth-accumulating entity held together by contra-productive values.
Another driving force behind the social democratic welfare state is the conviction that society's dialectic development towards an economically equal order is inevitable. Again, the conflict between social democracy and non-reformist socialists was one of method, where revolutionary socialists were concerned that the reformist agenda helped to ease the pressure on the capitalist system and thus sustain the order of things. From a social democratic point of view, the welfare state was, however, a means towards the same end of weakening the capitalist order.
A final observation concerns the idea that the welfare state came together with a common purpose, a driving force often formulated in terms of a national project. It was essential for the legitimacy of the social democratic tax-based welfare state that people were motivated to submit to a shared economy, and this motivation depended on a homogeneous population. The feeling that receivers of welfare are ‘just like me’ and that unfortunate circumstances could just as easily reverse one's own fortune, created a sense of solidarity, not with the people in need, but with the very project of social democracy. Analogously, the liberal welfare state has always had a strong tendency to employ its institutions as instruments to dismantle communities built around idiosyncratic values or world views.
Conclusions
To summarise, the conceptualisation of the modern welfare state consisted of a variety of ideas rooted in the Enlightenment and political scientism: positive rights for individuals comprehended as potential rational beings given the correct cultivation; society as a machine, with politics as potent social engineering rooted in theory (as opposed to politics as craftsmanship, built on experience); the redistribution of wealth towards equality (as opposed to the wealthy helping the poor); a dialectic, historical and necessary shift towards economic equality; and the welfare state as a national project dependent on a homogenous population and shared values.
Which, then, of these motives are the stable driving forces for the existing welfare state? I believe the reader can go down the list and conclude, at the very least, that few of these ideas today prevail as motivation for an existing European welfare state, nor do they contribute to an intellectual or passionate defence of the universal welfare state—and even less so to its furthering.
An analysis of this kind is urgently needed. It is an almost a priori conclusion that the growth of the welfare state depended upon the support and drive of the parallel emergence of a conceptual framework and a certain set of time-bound values. It does not follow that the demise of this supporting framework entails the breakdown of the European welfare state. It does, however, necessitate a new justification, and it would be a peculiar historical coincidence if this justification motivates the realisation of an identical welfare model. However it is viewed, the many-faceted European welfare state is in a state of crisis practically, but even more so philosophically and morally. The value of shared responsibility for the poor is still deeply rooted, as is the value of equal rights for every person in the pursuit of happiness. Yet, much of the discussion revolves around statistics, crisis management and partisan politics: Do hard numbers support claims that the welfare state promotes economic growth? Will the efforts to help Greece allow for an orderly default? Can for-profit models fill the role of state-owned and operated welfare institutions? While these discussions are indeed important, they fail to address the question of legitimacy. We are currently witnessing how technical and economic failures are leading to a partial dismantling of the welfare state in several European nations, but it is important to keep in mind that the paradigmatic features of an era never vanish as a consequence of technicalities. Such revolutions are always the result of crucial interaction in the dynamics between essential political change and the climate of ideas.
There are crucial differences between the scientific shifts referred to in the traditional theory of paradigms and political cataclysms. A scientific theory does not give up its hegemony unless a new and ‘better’ theory is at hand, and turmoil in the scientific realm typically does not become mayhem in society at large. Neither of these claims hold true for political stability. When it comes under attack, the trigger is typically an existing model's failure to deal with some perceived problems in society, but fundamentally the reason is that the underlying world-view, the necessary support in terms of conceptualisation and values, has lost its justification, or even its coherence.
If it is true that the driving forces that gave rise to the modern welfare state are becoming obsolete—and a general survey of the literature makes it hard to deny this—or at least that they are being very much challenged, then we need to discuss what other driving forces are at play instead, and what political consequences they might yield. We have no reason to believe that the future is determined, but we have every reason to believe that cultural, technological, philosophical and sociological influences affect the general direction in which open societies travel. Through the narrative of public debate, art, literature and so on, we must decide which option we will choose out of the many provided for us by history. The aspiration that society can live up to the important ethical principles of charity and equal rights without politics is naïve, and its extrapolation is appalling. The question is how do we justify the same ends when we no longer have recourse to the liberal and socialist ideals of the modern era?