Welfare ruination,debris and Europeans’ make-shift practices: A research agenda

Abstract

The mainstream literature on welfare retrenchment, austerity and post-welfare states proposes that since the mid 1970s, welfare states are in a state of ‘permanent austerity’. To offer an alternative to such stories of loss and their problematic nostalgic retelling of recent European history, leaving out its imperial histories, this article proposes to look instead at welfare as the object of ruination. This approach builds on literatures that focus on the experience of austerity and institutional violence to take a step further towards everyday responsive practices. Building on the work of Ann Laura Stoler, studying ruination and debris opens up the possibility to look at (1) the long durée of the colonial heritage of welfare, (2) ruination as an active and violent process and (3) welfare debris and how European dwellers use it and live in it. For Europeans, living amidst ruins and in a time of ruination, then, the question is: how can they build a life with the welfare debris that they are left with? Who is able to navigate the ruins and who is not? For researchers, this perspective can inform a new research agenda: a redirection of attention from welfare as ‘organized provision’ to, instead, how people organize the provisional, improvising with the rubble that remains.

‘Any person with a chance to change the course of the world must come to grips with the possibility that there is no redemption. Perhaps the only thing that can be done is to turn away from the inevitability of repetition, of the way individuals are continuously lured into thinking that behind the veil, under the floorboards, rests buried truth, buried treasure’.

AbdouMaliq Simone, The Surrounds, 2022: 113

Beyond stories of loss of welfare

Welfare state loss in space and time

A great many studies of contemporary European welfare states ¹ are stories of loss. Mainstream welfare state studies often outline how ‘we’ once had a welfare state and how under pressures such as neoliberalization (Clarke, 2003; Van Houdt, 2014), financialization and international markets (Dowling, 2017; Hemerijck, 2013), the welfare state is struggling, and European populations are left with fewer protections from market forces (Van Oorschot, 2006). This article proposes an alternative framework to be able to ask how European dwellers respond to austerity and welfare ruination and how they develop new practices.

While there has always also been a critical literature on welfare states, outlining its limits (see e.g. Lewis, 1992; Van Houdt, 2014), a mainstream welfare state literature describes the supposed ‘loss’ of the welfare state as ‘retrenchment’: studies that use this term are stories of a state that draws back protections that were once universal. In such accounts, European welfare states were built in the 20th century, especially in the decades after the Second World War and were meant to protect their citizens from, in the famous words of Lord Beveridge: ‘want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’ (quoted in Van Houdt, 2014: 109). Aiming for full paid employment (of men, at least), economic growth and the provision of public services such as education, health care and social security, the story goes, welfare states were a specific political project, to be placed in the mid-20th century and in ‘the West’ (Van Houdt, 2014: 108).

These narratives need to be troubled for us to understand how European dwellers live in welfare states in the present moment. This article sets out to offer an alternative perspective to stories of loss of a supposed universal welfare by building on the emerging literature that outlines the experience of austerity and welfare state violence in order to take that literature further and consider what every day Europeans do with the rubble and ruins that are left.

In accounts of retrenchment and austerity, the focus is usually on the lowering of benefits, the taking away of protections and on the exposure of citizens to markets (Jupp, 2021; Muehlebach, 2012; Starke, 2006; Van Oorschot, 2006). While there is often an acknowledgement that retrenchment happens alongside ‘reform’ (see Van Kersbergen et al., 2014), the main movement in the metaphors is one of withdrawal, of moving ‘back’, for instance in the metaphor of the ‘cutback’ or indeed of ‘retrenchment’, which, etymologically speaking, refers to removing oneself from a situation (e.g. in warfare). In the discipline of geography, Staeheli and Brown (2003), for example, asked ‘where has welfare gone?’. And Clark et al. (2005) even stated that ‘the welfare-state era has passed’ (p. 384), in their commentary titled ‘After the welfare state’. Some literature indeed terms the current condition the ‘post-welfare state’. Noting rising numbers of working people in poverty and the precariousness of people that are left with very few protections, the idea, then indeed, is that the welfare state is our past, and that scholars now identify a new time, in which people rely on each other more, for example in ‘citizen initiatives’ (Soares da Silva et al., 2018; compare Morgen and Maskovsky, 2003). The movement that the welfare state makes in these accounts, or has made, is spatial, when the state aims to be involved in less fields, but also temporal, when the idea is that there is a movement ‘past’ welfare. In stories of welfare ‘retrenchment’, therefore, there is a loss of welfare: people are thrown into a situation that temporally surpasses the project of the welfare state, a situation in which the state, in spatial terms, is no longer so close for many.

Aims and scope

This article proposes an alternative for three reasons. First, and as many scholars have worked to show, the welfare state was never a comprehensive architecture for all. It was based on citizenship, and thus on formal membership in the nation state, excluding residents without citizenship. Many welfare states, moreover, organized unequal access based on gender (Lewis, 1992). In addition, and crucially, as Bhambra (2022) shows, when they developed, welfare states were not just nation states, but imperial states, and the ‘we’ in accounts of the welfare state often does not include an account of the welfare states’ colonial subjects and exploitative relations with the (post)-colonies. While there is scholarly attention for such exclusionary and exploitative foundations, in much of the retrenchment literature, this is left out of the stories of loss. Second, politically, the stories of loss often lead to a desire to resurrect the welfare state or reestablish an alternative that resembles it. The political imaginary, then, is limited by the figure of the welfare state and has a hard time moving beyond its problematic past. Third, welfare states are, in fact, still very much in existence, in Europe and in the present moment, but they do different things (Peck, 2003). They have often become more conditional in efforts towards ‘activation’ through social security but also health care provisions or education (Arts, 2020). In addition, they increasingly subcontract their services to other, sometimes non-state actors, or are otherwise dispersed. In the field public administration, the term ‘governance’ is to attend to such new relations. Humphris (2019), in her work on home visits from British welfare workers to ‘Romanian Roma’ indeed points to a process of ‘governance through insecurity’ (p. 4), in which tasks and services are redistributed, dispersed, heightening insecurity around who can fall back on what or can be helped by whom: state-actors or NGO-workers. Similarly, Vollebergh et al. (2021) show how attempts to ‘govern through community’ lead to a pulling of neighbourhood networks and citizens into government roles, leading to vague and uncertain boundaries between what is the state and what is not. Welfare, therefore, often organizes instability itself, instead of protecting citizens from it (Arts, 2020; Lorey, 2015). To conceptualize welfare as ‘retrenched’ or to conceptualize a ‘post-welfare’ era is to miss the many redirections of efforts and funds. Stories of loss are, basically, a scholarly modality of mourning – a mourning that is a political commitment and investment, one that leaves little room for other questions.

In this article, I propose an alternative conceptual framework to the ‘retrenchment’ literature that centres on an understanding of welfare states as in a process of ruination. This, I believe, is both more productive in that it provides fresh avenues for research, and more politically potent because it points beyond imaginaries of loss. I build on the work of Stoler (2008) on imperial formations and ruination to propose looking at what it means to live in and act with these ruins. For Stoler, histories of empire and their continuing presence are better understood when seen as imperial formations because this allows for a study of the ‘political life of imperial debris’ (p. 193) – a study of how after empire, people are left with remainders of structures, power relations and material worlds. The important question, for Stoler, is to look at what people do with what they are left with: how debris may be used in contemporary efforts.

This is the focus that is proposed here too: the aim is to glean from disparate literatures a way forward in the study of welfare states and to ask what contemporary European dwellers do in response to ruination and with welfare debris. In this effort, this article builds on recent literature in geography that looks at affective responses to austerity or, more broadly, people’s everyday experiences of austerity (see e.g. Hitchen, 2021; Jupp, 2021; Raynor, 2017; Van Lanen, 2022). This literature has greatly enhanced our understanding of the space-time of austerity, its lived reality and thereby taken studies of austerity beyond the study of fiscal policy or policy responses. Indeed, in its focus on both geography and affect, we have learned how austerity is collectively felt. Often, indeed, austerity feels violent. Cooper and Whyte (2022), in a paper analysing the Grenfell Tower fire, conceptualize austerity as a form of institutional violence: austerity measures can have violent impact on the lives of Europeans, and can lead to situations in which people are exposed to new violence. Arts (2024), in the context of the Netherlands, also proposes that the Dutch welfare state often uses institutional violence. Austerity, then, is often not just an absence or a retrenchment, but a violent attack or a form of slow violence – something that we are unable to see through the framework of loss. The aim in this article is to build on this recent literature and to take it further into considering not only how people are affected by institutional violence and austerity, or how they experience it, but what practices they develop in response and with the elements of welfare that remain.

Allowing for more agency on the part of European dwellers, looking at welfare ruination enables us to, first, take the long durée of colonial heritage and welfare into account, allowing us to attend to the colonial, gendered and racial asymmetries in (lack of) state protection that always already characterized European welfare states. This will also enable us to see how such power structures may endure beyond welfare ruination. Second, it allows us to look at ruination as an active and violent process instead of viewing retrenchment as a simple (though targeted) drawing back. This way, we can see who is ruining welfare and who is harmed by ruination. Third, considering welfare ruination allows us to study welfare debris: the structures and rubble that remain. Looking at debris allows us a politically potent view on how the bits and pieces of welfare that remain may be used in contemporary makeshift practices: in improvised fleeting solidarities, new temporary anchors of security or oppressive new figurations that nonetheless attend to everyday needs. To be sure, I am not arguing for a view on improvisation as a preferred political answer to the ruination of more collective arrangements. New and old forms of violence will occur in improvisations. I do, however, want to argue that people respond to ruination in various ways with practices in addition to feelings and experiences and these responses should be taken seriously. While relatively understudied, Europeans have not passively undergone ‘retrenchment’. They have been crafting and recalibrating lives improvising with what has increasingly become a patchwork of welfare debris. Welfare ruination, therefore, will allow us to study the harm done to European residents while also bringing into focus how people use what is left. So importantly, while stories of loss highlight withdrawal and mourning, looking at welfare ruination gives us a view on both (a) the continuity in the violence of ruination and (b) the way people act with and in the ruins. Welfare has, in short, not disappeared, is not lost, but rather is still partially in place as a ruining and ruined structure that people use in various ways.

Western European welfare states and precarisation

Welfare states and the production of insecurity

In the decades after World War II in Western Europe, Fordist regimes of accumulation and ‘ways of life’ depended on wage labour on the one hand, and taxes and welfare states on the other (Amin, 1994; Lorey, 2015; Muehlebach, 2011). European welfare states, though very different, at that time generally aimed to achieve full (male) employment, economic growth, the provision of social services and a degree of redistribution of income and wealth (Streeck, 2016; Van Houdt, 2014). Fordist welfare regimes were based on a gendered order of family wages (Fraser, 2013), a racialised division of labour (Bassel and Emejulu, 2018; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) and the guarantee of various social benefits (Streeck, 2016).

For decades now, scholars widely agree that Western Europe is post-Fordist (Amin, 1994; Muehlebach, 2011). Even if they don’t agree exactly on what that means (Amin, 1994), there is broad consensus that post-Fordism is characterized by flexible specialization, volatile global markets, a destabilization of the relation between labour and capital, the end of the family wage (Fraser, 2013), the rise of service sectors (Amin, 1994), the fragmentation of cities and the dispersal of governance to other organizations. Further, many scholars agree that European welfare states have been ‘retrenching’ since the 1970s (Hemerijck, 2013; Van Kersbergen et al., 2014; Van Oorschot, 2006), resulting in a state of ‘permanent austerity’ (Pierson, 2001). A variety of welfare states (Hicks and Kenworthy, 2003; compare Esping-Andersen, 1990) were, this account goes, built to improve the welfare of citizens and to offer universal protection, but reforms have resulted in welfare states that are far more fragmented, less comprehensive than how they were conceived and often quite violent.

While there are disparate histories of welfare states in Europe and it is therefore important not to oversimplify a narrative of the European welfare state, social scientific scholarship on welfare states has itself often tried to grasp similarities and trends, by comparing welfare states and investigating regimes and welfare state futures (see e.g. the massive literature building on the work of Esping-Andersen, 1990). In the following, I strive to say something that speaks to multiple Western European welfare states and to draw on a great many empirical examples, to have a keen eye on the specificity of welfare state structures and histories while also trying to speak to European welfare states in general. I believe that my perspective on welfare ruination has something to offer research in various European countries, exactly to draw out how ruination plays out in different countries, how dwellers use what is left for them in situ and how power structures are reproduced or challenged in the process.

The Dutch welfare state, for example, slowly but surely has moved from a rather comprehensive system for citizens to a system that is far more conditional and focused on ‘personal responsibility’ and similar transitions happened in a variety of European welfare states (Van Oorschot, 2006). The French welfare state seems less affected by austerity, but as Bassel and Emejulu (2018) show, recent governments have in fact cut welfare costs, implemented in part through a freeze on public spending and shrinking of the public sector. The differential impact of such measures along lines of class, gender and race is often made to disappear in France because of a lack of statistics and aggregate data, but as accounts of activists and researchers make clear, minority women have been severely impacted (Bassel and Emejulu, 2018). In Germany, many austerity measures were taken in the years after the 1998 reunification, in the early 2000s, as a result of pressure to adhere to the European rules for fiscal discipline and affecting pensions and social assistance schemes (Eichhorst and Hassel, 2018).

Citizens that used to be able to depend on securities (in terms of care, income, education, etc.) offered by the welfare state and labour, increasingly cannot do so anymore. So while welfare states always already were exclusionary, more people experience this exclusion now and the provisions that are given do not offer the same securities as they did in earlier decades. Not only are there fewer guarantees, but the conditions attached to access to the welfare state create further insecurity (Arts, 2020; Clarke and Newman, 2012; Daly and Lewis, 2018). In the United Kingdom, for example, research showed how conditionality for welfare assistance in the form of mandatory activities or job search requirements, created various negative health impacts for people suffering from mental health issues, propelling cycles of further insecurity (Dwyer et al., 2020). In Denmark, too, welfare has been made increasingly conditional upon accepting job offers made by the decentralized state in municipalities (Eleveld et al., 2020). Meanwhile, healthcare arrangements have become more stringent too in many contexts. Care for older persons, for example, increasingly is purchased on commercial markets (Grootegoed et al., 2010), is restructured profoundly (Da Roit, 2010) or increasingly depends on very precariously employed nurses (Duijs, 2023). Welfare spending is still considerable in Europe (Hemerijck, 2013), but this does not mean that welfare offers the same security for as many people as it did in earlier decades and is therefore no longer a measure of welfare protection offered. Rather, welfare itself has become a source of insecurity (Arts, 2020; Lorey, 2015).

One response in scholarly literature has been to study precarisation. A growing body of work documents Europeans’ precariousness in its various forms and conceptualizes new vulnerabilities (for overviews see Alberti et al., 2018; Han, 2018; Hogg, 2021; Van den Berg, 2021; Van den Berg and Vonk, 2020). For Lorey (2015), the primary concern in studying precarisation should be how Europeans are governed by insecurity, the role welfare states play in this government and what that means for the possibilities and impossibilities of politics. Focusing on precarisation as a form of government, she argues that precarisation has become the norm, especially within developed welfare states that now offer a minimum of social assurance while maximizing instability. One of the ways in which this works is in the dispersal of services to other, sometimes non-state, actors (Humphris, 2019; Vollebergh et al., 2021). This important acknowledgement that welfare actively produces insecurity, distributing protection in new ways, has thus far not changed the basic questions in much welfare state research. Rather than inquire into the ways citizens have adapted to, and improvise with, these insecurities, studies and stories of loss prevail, as if, to speak with Simone (2022), searching ‘under the floorboards’ of the welfare state, seeking to resurrect its now buried treasures (p. 113).

‘Bitter echoes’: If only ‘we’ could have welfare back

However important the questions raised in the literature on precarisation, many scholars have centred their inquiries around the very securities that have been lost. Whether scholars argue for a reimagination of the welfare state (Hemerijck, 2013), or are documenting Europeans’ precariousness (Alberti et al., 2018) or are focusing on recreating lost labour securities (Appay, 2010), or are charting whether or not neoliberalism ‘dismantled’ the welfare state (Staeheli and Brown, 2003), it is has proven difficult to think beyond the security arrangements of the past. The figure of the welfare state limits the political imaginary, an imaginary that is used as if it is clear what the welfare state even is at this time. This becomes apparent, for example, in how the idea of a basic income captured much of the imagination of scholars and activists in Western Europe to try to work towards alternatives for lost welfare securities. It is often unclear just how basic income policies are to be different from the welfare states that were built before: based on the nation and citizenship, funded through taxation and, in most scenarios, hardly challenging the power relations in contemporary capitalism. A basic income, for one, will not change who controls the means of production (Petaccio, 2017; Van den Berg, 2021). Universal basic income organizing often ends up expecting security from the states and governments that organize the very insecurity it is supposed to relieve, without expecting much change from these states and the ways power is distributed and without attending to the question why states are producing these insecurities. The state does not have the kind of sovereignty vis-à-vis markets that would be necessary for such changes. In post-Fordism, instead, states prove their political control over debt to financial markets by cutting public expenditure and displacing risks to citizens in what Streeck (2016) terms the ‘consolidation state’. Displacing insecurity to citizens is precisely what the contemporary European state does. This means that even if collective political appeals for a basic income would be successful, it is highly doubtful if states would be able to implement it without fierce market responses.

With Berlant (2016), we could say that one of the challenges for Europeans now is to find new modes of living together, to craft sociality in such a way that it is ‘something other than an old hope’s bitter echo’ (p. 414). Both the enormous bodies of work outlining neoliberalism’s violence and the calls for new collective, state-centred arrangements, run the risk of being such bitter echoes in the sense that they often focus on what has been lost and how it may be resurrected rather than on speculating new socialities.

By contrast, in their work on informality and improvisation in urban settings in the Global South, Simone and Pieterse (2018) call for explorations of ‘speculative alternatives that can animate and stitch together a plethora of diverse and divergent molecular experiments’ (p. 56). This, they argue, is what will take us beyond the stories of loss. The relevant questions to ask, then, centre on how people and publics respond to the state’s organization of precariousness and vulnerability. Which alternative practices are developed in order to have a ‘livable provisional life’ (Berlant, 2016: 395)?

Colonialism and welfare state ruination

State abandonment and exploitation

One way forward is to acknowledge that there always already were publics that were not cared for or were abandoned by states or exploited to fund the care of others. Gilmore’s (2007) work in the United States on organized abandonment traces who the state chooses to care for and whom it abandons, incarcerates or polices. Care for publics, after all, was always accompanied by forms of control and policing (Piven and Cloward, 1993 [1971]), by gendering and racialization (Stoler, 2008) and interventions into intimate lives (Hertoghs and Schinkel, 2018; Humphris, 2019; Stoler, 2008; Vollebergh et al., 2021). Gilmore considers various forms of organized abandonment – lack of infrastructures, health care, education – and how they organize ‘premature death’. Under conditions of racial capitalism, this is organized along lines of race, or even is what racism is (Gilmore, 2007; Gilmore & Gilmore, 2022 [2008]). Rather than conceptualizing a retreat of the state, or welfare retrenchment, therefore, Gilmore prefers to trace what state agencies do and how their practices and functions change. To challenge the story of loss so often heard in scholarly work, it is crucial to build on such work that already acknowledges that the welfare state was always harmful and exploitative (compare Arts, 2024; Cooper and Whyte, 2022). There is, for example, a large body of feminist work on the various ways in which the European welfare state was gendered and therefore access was often based on gendered roles, for instance through unpaid labour in marriage or in motherhood (Lewis, 1992). The ‘social contract’, indeed, always already constituted a ‘sexual contract’ (Pateman, 1988), and a ‘racial contract’ (Mills, 2014).

The work of Gurminder Bhambra shows us just how important it is to consider the histories of welfare as histories of imperial states and not just nation states (2022 and with John Holmwood: Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018). Bhambra (2022) asks, for example, what it means to talk about taxation as the basis of welfare solidarity. In the literature about European social contracts, she argues, the story is often about how state taxation was exchanged for states’ protection of private property. But in the context of the imperial states of Europe, taxation on European soil should be considered alongside of extraction from the colonies. For the British welfare state, Bhambra (2022) argues, imperial revenue legitimized the nation state in Europe. We should not assume that early forms of generalized solidarities in Europe were fully funded through taxation in Europe and based on citizenship but, instead, think through in which asymmetrical relationship to the colonies funding was extracted as well.

Another example of the relation between colonialism and welfare is how welfare and its intimate interventions were tested in the colonies. Stoler (2008) has shown how moral hygiene campaigns, as these rehearsals were called, took place overseas, for example in the Dutch Indies. But they were also implemented on European soil, in ‘colonies’ ‘at home’ in the 19th century and sometimes well into the 20th, leaving remnants in the 21st (De Ruig, 2022). Stefano Harney and Willem Schinkel write about how a Dutch ‘Society of Benevolence’ became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021 based on the very argument that these colonies planted the seed for the welfare state. The focus in both colonies overseas and in Europe was on the ‘improvement’ of its people and always based in an assessment of lack – a lack that the later welfare state promised to address (Harney and Schinkel, 2021).

These histories and relationships are usually kept beyond the scope of welfare state research that considers a contemporary loss of services or ‘retrenchment’ within European nation states and on European soil. Yet they are crucial in understanding who was helped or harmed in ‘security for all’, in whose image solidarities were built and how asymmetries in empires live on in the present, for example when postcolonial migrants’ access to welfare state arrangements is under pressure. They are, then, also crucial in understanding the different ways people adapt to and improvise with (state-produced) insecurities.

In the Netherlands, the question of who can be part of the ‘imaginary of the welfare state’ (Bhambra, 2022), has been hotly debated for decades now, often in terms of race (Van Reekum, 2024). In recent Dutch history, the relevance of the state’s colonial history is apparent in the Benefits Scandal (‘Toeslagenschandaal’ in Dutch, for a more extensive analysis see Arts and Van den Berg, forthcoming), a scandal that led to the resignation of the government. The Dutch state used ethnic and racial profiling to accuse parents of young children of committing fraud with their tax benefits, benefits that were meant to be subsidies for paid childcare. Especially families with heritage in the former Dutch colonies, such as the Caribbean parts of the Netherlands and Suriname were hit. Because families had to compensate for this supposed ‘fraud’, at least 35,000 Dutch families were thrown into severe debt and years of financial and legal struggle, a struggle that is ongoing for many. For the parents of more than 2000 children, this eventually even led to the loss of custody of their children (CBS, 2022). The Dutch state has formally acknowledged that ‘institutional racism’ was part of the problem in the Benefits Scandal, but at the same time treats this racism as incidental (Arts and Van den Berg, forthcoming). The Benefits Scandal shows how Dutch colonial history lives on in the lives of ordinary Dutch citizens, in the claims they can make and the violence they still endure. Ruination, in a case like this, is targeted towards specific, racialized, populations.

The welfare state, thus, is not only conditional or exclusionary, but, especially in the context of colonial histories, also exploitative and, as the Benefits Scandal example shows, actively harmful for some and sometimes for a long time. As with ruined cities, however, some structures are indeed standing strong even after and in processes of ruination. In the case of welfare states, this means that while precarisation may affect everyone, it affects some much more profoundly than others (Hogg, 2021; Lorey, 2015). So while for some, the welfare state actively ruins their lives, for others, some parts of the welfare state are still very much intact, protecting theirs. There is an array of subsidies still in place, and certain lives – of people, corporations, banks and markets – are saved routinely. If the Covid-19 crisis taught us anything, it is that certain lives and ‘ways of life’ are protected at high cost while other lives are made expendable (Schinkel, 2021).

Welfare ruination

To shift from a modality of mourning and loss towards a perspective that attends to the everyday and improvised productions in and of lives, I propose to study the welfare state as an object of ruination. Austerity and retrenchment, in this view, are processes of ruination: access to securities is limited, violently destroyed, actively withdrawn from certain, often gendered and racialised, populations. Ruination can ruin lives, social relations, social policies and public infrastructures and it is often specific: certain (racialised, gendered) populations are targeted. Sometimes certain populations do have access but are targeted as illegitimate subjects and ruined in their inclusion, such as in the Benefits Scandal. Sometimes working class and poor people are even blamed for the conservative claimed ‘broken’ state of the state, for example in the UK, as McKenzie (2015) showed. Gendered and racialised ruination was apparent in French and UK austerity measures, that left minority women struggling to survive (Bassel and Emejulu, 2018), but also in the various rounds of ‘reform’ that the Trojka implemented in Southern European states in the debt crisis that followed the financial crisis of 2008. In Greece particularly extreme measures ruined the welfare system, leaving many struggling to organize basic social reproduction (Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2013). In Finland, welfare transitioned into workfare rapidly and this put Russian-speaking young people in a position where they had to actively resist racialised classification as ‘welfare abuser’ to qualify for certain benefits (Krivonos, 2018). Cooper and Whyte (2022) have, in the context of the UK, outlined how austerity is often violence, directly affecting particular populations and increasing the likelihood of other forms of violence to occur.

My understanding of welfare ruination builds on the framework that Stoler (2008) developed for understanding imperial formations and takes this focus on violence further. To take seriously the long durée of European welfare states’ colonial histories and contemporary forms of imperialism, informing whom the state choses to care for and on what grounds, this framework helps us understand how European welfare states are actively ruined. For Stoler (2008), to keep from a romantic or even melancholic gaze towards the ruins of empire, it is important to look instead at ruination: an active and ongoing process that is ‘vibrantly violent’ (p. 194). Imperialism, in this view, is not over, even after the empire is dismantled. Rather, imperial formations live on in various ways. Imperial formations, Stoler (2008) notes, ‘are relations of force’ and ‘sliding and contested scales of differential rights’ (p. 193).

Empires are often taken down or dismantled by the oppressed and colonized. Uprisings and anti-colonial wars typically start from below and start dismantling what was built from above or from afar. While imperial formations live on, efforts to challenge and dismantle it often come from below. Welfare ruination works quite differently, because welfare services are usually dismantled from above, by planned interventions of austerity or ‘reform’. Welfare ruination, therefore, though very much felt in the everyday intimate lives of ordinary citizens, is designed in the offices of politicians, bureaucrats or in councils and parliaments and not fought for in violent uprisings. Welfare ruination is violent in its effects but administered quite bureaucratically, routinely and usually at a distance. The formations and ruins that remain are leftovers, therefore, not of a taken-down rule, but of a top-down process called ‘governance’, often scattering debris over many actors and entities. These important differences notwithstanding, Stoler’s concept of ruination is brought to bear here on European welfare states.

This is because focusing on welfare ruination and using critical components of Stoler’s conceptual framework allows us an analysis of recent changes in the welfare state not as retrenchment and loss, but as active ruination. It allows us as scholars to steer clear from nostalgia and take seriously the violence involved and the ways in which these forms of violence are related to colonial histories. Indeed, while the welfare state may be ruined and many people fall through the cracks, stories of loss will likely romanticize welfare’s history and nostalgically keep us in a loop of bitter echoes. Looking at the welfare state’s ruination, however, allows us to chronicle who is ruining it, who performs this violence, for whom the welfare state is ruined, who is able to still extend welfare and who suffers premature death because of it.

Crucially – and this is where the present proposal reaches farther than most scholarship on welfare states – Stoler’s framework allows us to consider how the debris that European dwellers are left with after and in ruination may be taken up in building new lives and livelihoods together, however provisional and improvisational. The question then is not so much to look behind or underneath the ruins, but to look at what people do with them. This allows those affected by violent ruination to surface as active agents in a way that a scholarly focus on loss, austerity or institutional violence is less able to do. Stoler refers to the work of Lévi-Strauss and considers forms of bricolage: people that live in the rubble of colonial formations will use this debris in new configurations for their livelihoods. In contemporary Western Europe, elements of welfare states and Fordism persist as debris but do not offer comprehensive or stable security. The debris may include welfare elements such as housing subsidies, publicly financed health care, pensions or former state actors with the networks and knowledge that still can get things done. Where austerity and welfare ruination were extreme, such as Greece and Italy, the debris of one or two family members’ pensions serves as a basis for security for entire extended families (Muehlebach, 2017). And while, in the United Kingdom, many children grow up in poverty, access to the NHS persist, though it is under constant pressure. So working class people in the UK work with various state provisions to build forms of security together in often precarious and fleeting ways, as McKenzie’s (2015) account of life in a council estate in Nottingham shows us. Similarly, where there is still public housing, dwellers may share these relatively affordable living spaces with temporary others.

Debris may also take the form of gendered expectations of reproductive labour that structure current divisions of labour and security, as mothers are left to care for their children, while other members of their family depend on that unpaid labour (McDowell, 2011). These expectations were justified in a welfare system that accommodated a breadwinner model, but no longer fit in the current conjuncture, where everyone has to work to make ends meet. Yet they live on. Muehlebach (2011) writes about such affective ‘afterlives’ of Fordism; in which ‘ghostly presences’ remain (p. 62). Welfare debris varies greatly among states and even at the local level, since in many countries, welfare has also been decentralized to municipalities (López-Santana and Moyer, 2012). In any case, and to quote Stoler (2008): ‘To think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artefacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present’ (p. 196). Applied to welfare ruination; the question is how the debris of welfare is appropriated and actively used in new practices.

Living in ruins: Debris and make-shift practices

Living with ruins, using debris

Researching ruination and conceptualizing how Europeans take up debris helps steer clear from welfare mourning, of telling stories of lost solidarities as if welfare was not always based in colonial histories and as if welfare was ever for everyone. It also keeps scholars from desiring a resurrection of a welfare past. The opening quote to this article by Simone (2022) expresses this well: ‘Any person with a chance to change the course of the world must come to grips with the possibility that there is no redemption. Perhaps the only thing that can be done is to turn away from the inevitability of repetition, of the way individuals are continuously lured into thinking that behind the veil, under the floorboards, rests buried truth, buried treasure’ (p. 113). Simone writes from the context of urban life in the majority worlds of the Global South and considers collective life as a set of ‘strange accompaniments’: fleeting moments of acting together, of moving in the same direction, of assembling momentary solidarities. Taking this with us in the questions to be considered in Western Europe, in itself another ‘strange accompaniment’ of sorts, leads us to a way forward in research: to consider what people actually do with the debris of welfare ruination.

In still other words, Tsing (2015) asks how life amidst ruination is possible. Writing about the matsutake mushroom and where it grows in capitalist ruins, Tsing sensitizes readers to how capitalism destroys entanglements between species and various forms of life, thereby making life impossible for some. But, she writes, collaboration and acting in concert still happens, even amidst the most toxic ruins of nuclear disaster. We can see, feel and smell these collaborations if we care to notice. Tsing (2015) even conceptualizes precarity as living in ruins, and in ‘uncongealed confusion’ (p. 98). Precarity, for her, is not just the vulnerability that remains after loss, but a possibility to notice ‘latent commons’ (p. 135): the relationships that may develop into new provisional dependencies if we notice and mobilize them. Thinking in terms of more-than-human socialities, Tsing insists on moving on from thinking in terms of ‘progress’ and on learning, instead, ‘to get by’ and ‘live well with others’ (p. 279) amidst planetary destruction. So, rather than researching the loss of the welfare state, populations’ attitudes towards this loss, or desires of Europeans to return to secure employment or the Fordist welfare state, or solely how Europeans experience ruination, our aim as scholars could also be to learn from how Europeans are already improvising their livelihoods amidst ruins. This is a vantage point that would enable us to look beyond the solidarity arrangements of earlier decades (compare Simone and Pieterse, 2018).

There is much to be learned here from research in the Global South, as many people in the majority world have already dealt with economic insecurity brought about by global economic changes and waves of ruination (Mies and Shiva, 2014; Peake and Rieker, 2013). Further destroying subsistence economies, a recent round of ruination took place when the IMF imposed Structural Adjustment Programs to many countries in the 1980s and 90s, flooding local markets with cheap goods, ruining protections that were in place for local populations. But many also found new ways to subsist through struggle (Peake and Rieker, 2013). Even if subsistence appears impossible, in the places that the UN calls ‘uninhabitable’, people survive. Simone (2019) writes how urban residents improvise lives and life itself as both a matter of refusal and care – a refusal to be captured and a matter of care extended to make some ongoingness of life possible, a taking care of creating possibilities, even if individual people suffer from a lack of care. He asks readers to consider these forms of improvisation a political practice, to see that besides the injustice of the existence of so-called ‘uninhabitable’ places, there is also the injustice of not taking care to notice how people work through. This is not, of course, to romanticize such improvisations or to glance over the injustices lived by many. It is, however, to ask to take note of what people actually do in the face of such injustices. These are important insights to take on board in considering living with welfare debris.

(In)formal entanglements and repair

Welfare, then, appears alongside and entangled with informal practices of subsistence, or an instrument in such informal practices. The formal and the informal is not so easy to distinguish amidst ruins, if they ever are. They may be stitched together in attempts to repair livelihoods and certain forms of debris may be spread thin over many people, for example when a mother on welfare works informally to supplement her extended family’s income. As Haid and Hilbrandt (2019) argue, while the literature on informality is ‘haunted by a geographical bias’, usually addressing issues in the Global South, the default conceptualization of informality as ‘beyond the reach of the state’ and formality as within the state needs to be troubled for it to be of use in understanding entanglements in the Global North. Informality sometimes appears for states as ‘fraud’, ‘corruption’ or in any case as a problem to be solved with more policing policies. Sometimes, though, it also appears as the solution, when local states ask citizens to ‘take responsibility’, for example. When seen from within the rubble, from the vantage point of ordinary and mundane practices of subsistence, Koster and Nuijten (2016) argue, informality often looks more predictable than state planning. What is more, given the extent of ruination and precarisation in certain European states, we will be unable to understand how people survive, or how, as Simone and Pieterse (2018) say ‘things get done’ (p. 39) if we do not look at informal practices.

Finding the right care for a child with a disability, for example, may lead to parents’ and communities’ coming together and stitching together networks and resources to organize care in situated, improvised ways. They may fail or risk producing new forms of violence in this process. So, a focus on the makeshift does not mean that we cannot see the brokenness of welfare states, the unevenness and racial and gendered asymmetries that endure or are strengthened or the underfunding that made the precariousness of children with disabilities and their caretakers a problem in the first place. The child and its caretakers may break down under the pressure of the responsibility and strain, they may encounter conflict over the terms of their engagement, it is likely that women will take up most of the caring duties and there may be moments when care is not provided in the way in which it is necessary. These are all important to consider. The point I am making here, however, is that the ones caring for this child will most likely not be able either to wait for the welfare state or to manage alone. They will have to navigate care together, in practices with and beyond the remnants of the welfare state, because ‘social care is the only way to navigate plunder but (. . .) care is the very thing being plundered’ (Simone, 2022: 115).

Indeed, improvisation or make-shift practices are not to be thought of as benign unproblematic endeavours. Various forms of violence may well and often do occur in such improvisations. Sometimes no improvisations take hold at all and people and practices are abandoned. As some of the literature on austerity and its everyday effects on citizens clearly shows, sometimes austerity builds towards a sense of the inevitability of more austerity to occur, leading people to primarily plan for a new round of ruinations rather than improvise new constellations. Library workers in the UK, Hitchen (2021) shows, lived austerity as an uncanny atmosphere, a certain paranoia leading them to anticipate what a new hit to the services they work to uphold will be like. Such pessimism about the future and the fragmented embrace of austerity measures were also what Jupp (2021) noted in her research about ‘localism’ as a form of austerity in the UK.

An especially thoughtful account of how welfare becomes part of new improvisations amidst rubble is Brković’s (2017) study of clientelism in Bosnia Herzegovina. For her, the question is how, postwar and postsocialism, both the system of welfare and clientelism become elements in new formations and dynamics of ambiguity. Indeed, where voices from Western Europe were often quick to say that that Bosnia Herzegovina is only to become truly European when clientelism is finally defeated by the neoliberal state, Brković argues that the unclear boundaries between the informal and formal fit in a global trend and precisely in neoliberalism. Access to welfare and to rights is negotiated by citizens amid ambiguity, she shows, as some are well positioned to manage ambiguity, while some are not. In fact, neoliberal restructuring and retrenchment, Brković argues, often involves a repositioning of access to welfare arrangements as ‘a matter of personal compassion, ethics and morality’, and not just in Bosnia Herzegovina. Rights, then, are sometimes still intact, but who can access them and in which circumstances has become unpredictable, but not unmanageable to some who have become powerful precisely because of their ability to manage this ambiguity. So, improvisations with welfare arrangements can reproduce power relations or create new disparities and injustices. Muehlebach (2012), furthermore, shows how in the Lombardy region of Italy, neoliberal welfare reform led to a strong focus on voluntarism and a focus on morality. These practices, therefore, did not speculate a new improvised response, but rather strengthened moral repertoires and enabled capitalist transformation. These are important lessons for a way forward in the study of welfare states: not only who loses rights through ruination or which rights are withdrawn, but also who is able to manage the debris of the welfare state in such a way that access to rights can be won and which power structures (re) surface or are either strengthened or challenged in these practices.

Improvisational, everyday responses to austerity, moreover, should also be considered as political responses and as happening alongside more collective political organizing. When the Greek saw their welfare state ruined by the Trojka, they initiated various forms of repair (Arampatzi, 2018). Far from a romantic story, they had to finds new ways of getting by, of finding subsistence and care. Arampatzi notes how the ruination of infrastructures of care and social reproduction prompted practices of resistance among Athenians that elaborated new infrastructures of care as a form of ‘organising from below’ (p. 2156). These new infrastructures sometimes were geographically based in social centres that could be considered welfare debris or organized against the further ruination of local institutions. While collective political protests, such as the 2011 protests in Athens, were commonly understood as political, the everyday make-shift practices that the Greeks had to engage in should also be considered political responses to ruination (compare Petrova and Prodromidou, 2019).

A research agenda: From ‘organized provision’ to organizing the provisional

Williams (1983) defined welfare as a form of ‘organized provision’ (p. 333). Indeed, welfare, as the collection of projects that many European welfare states developed in the 20th century, was an organized effort to put in place generalized protections and provisions for its citizens. While always already exclusionary and violent, after decades of austerity measures and redirections of funds and attention, welfare now actively organizes insecurity for a much wider group of European dwellers. This means that for many living in Europe today, welfare no longer offers organized provision. The argument that I have developed in this article is that European welfare is best conceptualized as in the process of ruination, because this allows for a view on how welfare debris is picked up and made useful in everyday makeshift practices of Europeans to make ends meet, to organize new forms of sociality and informally organize solidarities. Presently, therefore, many Europeans are organizing the provisional and provisionally organizing with what is left of organized provision, sometimes in addition to relying on welfare and sometimes in the absence of such organization of care. Or, better still: pieces of debris of the welfare state feature in organizations of the provisional, as anchors to build temporary forms of security.

In a sense, this is nothing new. For those for whom the welfare state never provided enough security, survival was always about creatively putting together a life out of whatever was available. Steering clear of romanticizing these practices of subsistence and survival, therefore, the proposal here is to look at how European dwellers use what the state has to offer now, in this moment, and how formal debris is entangled with the informal in makeshift practices. To be sure, the state and its remaining welfare provisions appears in practices of improvisation, but the state cannot be assumed to be the stable basis of security for most Europeans living amidst welfare debris.

For scholars, this implies a new research agenda. It implies changing focus from the loss of welfare to paying attention to welfare debris and how it is used. Rather than looking at how the state is ‘rolling back’ welfare or leaving its citizens alone in harsh markets, a way forward in research is to study what European dwellers actually do with the debris they are left with. This shift will enable researchers to come out of the mode of mourning and instead find a way forward in studying what people do with European welfare states and how welfare is actively ruined, not as a politically viable alternative to collective arrangements, but as way to take seriously the already political responses taking place in the present moment. Various studies already look closely at the institutional violence that austerity often is on the one hand, or at the experience of such violence for workers and dwellers on the other hand. The proposal here is to take that literature further and look at the practices developed amid the ruins. These are political practices, to be sure, but also often mundane and geared towards everyday survival. Sometimes these practices will look like new ‘latent commons’ (Tsing, 2015: 135), or new solidarities. Sometimes they will take the form of new and old violences. Crucial in this project is a critical eye on who has access to which welfare ruins and the roles institutions play in this access. Some social services and rights have remained after various rounds of austerity and ruination. The question then becomes who is able and well positioned to navigate the ruins to salvage what is left. Moreover, when scholars focus on Europeans and how they work towards subsistence with debris, they will also be able to trace in detail which power structures remain, are challenged, reinstated or dismantled.

Theoretically, this involves a different temporality. Instead of looking at welfare in the modernist categories of collective progress or looking at austerity and retrenchment as a form of regression, looking at makeshift practices and ruination involves a focus on how certain moments and opportunities may be used. Europeans assemble provisional arrangements together without necessarily expecting them to grow or to be there in the future. Researchers, therefore, should also shift – they should shift attention from the loss of securities and how Europeans think and feel about this to how European residents actually, practically, go about responding to the violence they face and which new challenges they encounter in this process.