Introduction: Poverty and Deviance in the Era of the Emerging Welfare State

Abstract

During recent decades, the problem of’ social exclusion’ has been widely discussed in Europe. Since the early 1990s, when the term first came to prominence in France, it has rapidly gained currency as a key word in a transnational debate on the new challenges faced by highly developed Western societies — a debate that prompted the European Union to proclaim 2010 the ‘European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion’.¹ Although modern welfare states have produced a level of affluence unprecedented in history, symptoms of erosion are apparent. The oft-deplored crisis of the welfare state has many different facets, and many causes have been identified. Yet there is a widely- shared assumption that economic factors such as high rates of unemployment and the financial overburdening of social insurance systems cannot alone be blamed. Rather, social exclusion has a cultural side as well. The established mechanisms of social inclusion seem especially to be failing to have an effect on groups on the margins of society that are not only materially disadvantaged but are also in some way ‘deviant’. The welfare state aims at inclusion, but has difficulty including groups who do not think, behave and live as the ‘normal’ citizen does. So social exclusion is, at least in part, related to a (perceived) lack of adaptation to dominant cultural attitudes.