Towards a European welfare state?

Abstract

Europe is more than just a geographical entity. And it is more than a ‘common market’. Europe has a common tradition in war, peace, culture and, above all, welfare statism-making it a distinct peninsula on the Asian continent (Schulze, 1990). The legally still separate West European nations may be about to merge into a United States of Europe (‘USE’) or at least into a steadily increasing ‘pool’ of ‘shared sovereignties’—an economic, political as well as cultural entity of its own-analogous to but also quite different from the USA. This process and prospect has been gaining momentum during the past two decades. After several unsuccessful attempts, the Single European Act of 28 February, 1986 and the Maastricht summit of December 1991 have moved the European Community (EC) closer to an economic, a political, and to some extent also a social union.1 By now, the EC has definitely developed beyond just a ‘tariff union’—but where is it moving? Will there be a European welfare state, a ‘transnational synthesis’ (Offe 1990:8) of national welfare states, with ‘European social citizenship’ being one backbone of the USE? Or will the welfare state, which is ‘characteristic only for this part of the world’ (van Langendonck, 1991), be irrelevant for ‘building the new European state’? Will fragmented ‘social citizenships’ remain at the national level, where they might slowly erode? (c.f. Majone, 1992) If European unification were not to be based on ‘social citizenship’, European welfare regimes would remain at the USE’s state or ‘regional’ level and stay below the supranational level of visibility. The regimes of poverty policy, the most exposed parts of social citizenship, would then be most likely to corrode slowly and inconspicuously. This may cause phantom pain for social welfare and, in particular, poverty experts. In their respective national contexts they would be struggling with the consequences of something that never came to be: a European welfare state built on a European poverty policy.

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