Dawn Judd / Jürgen Boeckh / Aase Mygind Madsen: Chicken or egg? Global economic crisis or ideological retrenchment from welfare in three European countries
• Welfare state is decentralised – especially the social services are in responsibility of the local authorities. Hard to provide general assessment on quantity and quality of social services
• Social security is (still) very expensive – 888 billion Euro in 2015 (pensions 330 billion, health care 365 billion)
• Expenses were increasing during the GEC (exception 2009) in absolute figures
Challenges in Germany
• No ‚Thatcherism‘ in Germany but ‚Blairism‘ -> Third way discussion (1999)
Schröder/Blair paper-> concentration on workfare instead of welfare (activating social state)
• New public management starting in the 90ies introduced more competition between welfare service providers. Especially the working conditions for social workers downgraded
• But all in all: No harsh cuts on federal level neither before nor after GEC
• Cuts on regional and local level possible due to unequal distribution of economic power between the regions
• A strong and growing stratification in our society: 16 Million people live at risk of poverty (EU definition)
• In the same time: lowest unemployment rate since decades (5.8 % in 10/2016)
• There is also a strong regional stratification
• A lot of anxiety in the society – people feel that social state is loosing capacity to provide securtiy. A growing number of people is unable to cope with the social changes in the past 35 years – especially: the multicultural society (e.g. Pegida)
• Not the distribution of welfare as consequence of the federal tax policy is blamed but target groups like migrants, refugees and other weak groups
• New keywords like prevention and inclusion have much more impact on social work than the GEC or budget cuts
• Last but not least: the poison of neo-liberalism is active – there is a tendency of de-solidarisation in the society
• People mistrust state institutions like welfare state and begin to think that they will be better of when they take care for themselves. They think market distrubution is mor fair than state distribution. They forget that only the rich can afford a weak state.
• There has been and continues to be cuts in allowances and services. Most recently with the Liberal government since 2015 there have been further cuts in social assistance and a return to a specifically low immigration allowance.
• The cuts were not caused by the financial crisis, but represent a general turn towards neoliberalism and efforts to make people responsible for their own lives.
• So far it has meant increased inequality, less social mobility and poverty in certain segment of the population.
• Some commentators argue that we have now become an 80% (well off)-20%
(poor) country.
• The Danish ‘at risk of poverty’ figures were much lower than in the UK and Germany, which should be a clear indication of the poverty reducing impact of the universal welfare system.
• Universal welfare states not only tend to result in reduced poverty, but also impact positively on equality, tend to reduce stigmatization and increase trust (not least to public authorities).
• With the withdrawal of the universal welfare state not only poverty, both also inequality is affected.
• Distributional inequality (Göran Therborn) is immediately affected by welfare cuts. Inequality in health has increased and so has inequality especially between immigrants and ethnic Danes.
• The impact on the social work profession has been reduced autonomy to make decisions based on the profession’s ideal of a holistic perspective on the client.
Some of the new guiding principles that have replaced it are:
• The principle of activation
• The principle of rehabilitation
• Then the most difficult to asses, as I see it: the change to a guiding principle characterized by words like coexistence, participation, inclusion, co-creation (ownership to your own life project etc).
