From welfare states to partnering societies – the new framework for changing welfare

There are different views on welfare in our world. It does not exist or is very limited for a large majority of our fellows human beings in the world, It is restricted voluntarily to a living minimum (some would say less) in the US and some European countries, and it is extremely developped in some central european countries, such as France and Germany, and in the Nordic European countries. This working paper, written in 2006 by Elina Palola, Taina Rintala and Annikki Savio, insists on the necessity of renovating welfare policies by introducing the notion of partnership, and thus developing democracy … and efficience. It is part of a global concept that I personally call the next step of (social) democracy, after the failure of the british third way.

Conclusion

The concept of partnership as a means of social description suggests a crumbling of old social structures, a constant flow of messages and a resultant reconstruction of social reality (Allardt 1998, 93). A sign of the change of social structures and practices is that we have increasingly moved from representative democracy to deliberative democracy: With the emergence of various partnership networks, there is no longer any need to make traditional distinctions, divisions and categorisations – for instance, between the public and the private or the economy and the social – but different processes and dimensions intertwine to an ever greater degree; at the same time the arenas of impartial communication disappear.

The European Social Model (ESM) and cultural diversity in Europe

This analysis, from Jean-Claude Barbier, is a working paper from the Department of Economic, Politics and Public Administration of Aalborg University, already well-known for our readers. The idea of referring to cultural diversity in order to analyse the European Social model is an interesting one, and, even if it not stricto sensu a Nordic work, I feel that it is interesting for all our readers.

Introduction

In the past forty years a voluminous body of literature has been published to analyse the phenomena of European integration, Europeanization, convergence and diversity of all kinds of institutions and social practices across states that are members of the European Union. A long journey was made from the first studies, like for instance Ernst Haas’s who, in 1968, revisited his 1958 theory of ‘spill-over’, after General de Gaulle, to him, had changed the conditions of European integration, because he was “a true nineteenth nationalist” (1968: xviii). Spill-over, Haas thought in 1958, in the first edition of his book, was inevitable: it was, he wrote, “unlikely that the General Common Market can avoid a species of political federalism in or-der to function as an economic organ” (1968: 317). Why “political federalism” has still to really emerge in the present conditions remains to be explained and we will deal with only one small angle to this question, namely, the special case of the ‘social dimension’ of European integration.

We will contend here that, despite the immense change brought to Europe by the 50 years of initiatives started by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, despite the crucial aspect of ‘negative integration’ (Scharpf 2000) and the increasing homogenisation of elites through their cross-national socialisation, ‘political cultures’ still matter to such an important degree that they preclude, and probably will preclude for a long time, the very possibility of actually implementing the basic process and practices that ‘solidarity’ demands, under the now classical institutionalised forms of ‘social protection’ (Barbier and Théret 2004).