Challenges and Change: Issues and Perspectives in the Analysis of Globalization and the European Welfare States

Abstract

Globalization and its effects became key objects of concern in the late 1990s. Politicians, journalists and academics shared this concern, often expressed as a requirement for ‘less state and more market’ in the new global world. Most failed, however, to support their arguments with evidence. But in recent years, academic social scientists have sought to subject the notion of globalization and consideration of its effects to more balanced and empirically supported analysis. Various studies have also pointed to significant changes in welfare states in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Europe, some even suggesting the demise of the classic European social model. Whilst there is an ever-growing literature on globalization,¹ matched by a similar, if somewhat less rapidly burgeoning literature on welfare state change,² comparatively little has been written on the interaction between the two.³ The key question with which this book concerns itself brings these two areas of study together and is: How far, and in what ways, has the process of globalization been implicated in recent changes to European welfare states? This question is deceptively simple and needs to be unpacked into a number of contributory questions and issues for analysis. What, exactly, is the globalization process, and which of its multiple aspects are most likely to affect national welfare states? What have been the most significant changes in European welfare states in recent years? What factors, besides globalization, have been implicated in such changes? Last, and not least, how far do these same welfare state changes affect and, indeed, mould the globalization process?