The Context: Welfare State Transformation

Abstract

This book is about the role of only a small number of British and German think-tanks in the modernisation of political party principles and governmental policy. To place this in-depth and detailed study into its proper political, social and economic context, the following pages discuss the ‘larger conditions of action’ (Mahoney & Snyder, 1999) in which these think-tanks operated. This contextualisation encompasses an outline of the rise of British welfare state and German Sozialstaat after the Second World War, a discussion of the faltering hegemony of the Keynesian paradigm and the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in the 1970s, and an overview of the crisis of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s. In the second part of this chapter I discuss the crisis of the two major British and German centre-left political parties, Labour and SPD, with respect to change in the meaning of their core value of ‘social justice’ and how this change was translated into their policy agenda. The motivation for including this discussion in the book is that, after all, the rise and crisis of the welfare state in both countries are historically bound to the success and failure of these two parties. The third part of this chapter outlines the short-lived rebirth of the European centre left in the late 1990s, the accompanying debate about future welfare state models and the development of the new Social Democratic labour- market and social policy under the banner of the Third Way.