ESRC seminar: The Welfare State in the Post(?)-Crisis Landscape

King's College London
June 03-04, 2016

Theme Statement

After Mario Draghi announced ECB’s Outright Monetary Transaction Programme in September 2012, bond-yield spreads narrowed in the Eurozone and put an end to the immediacy of the Eurozone crisis in the sense that the common currency was stabilised.

Yet, Europe’s crisis is not over. Contestation over the ‘politics of austerity’ continues to raise questions over the legitimacy of orthodox models of economic policy. Such questions and contestation intersect in complex ways with moral panics such as that of Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’. The attendant political manifestations are complex and varied. They include territorialisation of political cleavages (the question of a possible ‘Brexit’ and the increased appeal of separatist movements in, for instance, Scotland and Catalunya); the rise of the populist nationalist right; the decline, and in some cases outright collapse, of social democracy and recomposition of the Left giving rise to parties such as Syriza and Podemos. Negotiations over the Greek debt raised profound questions about the politics of representation in the Eurozone with some suggesting that Europe is moving towards an increasingly authoritarian form of neoliberalism.

This workshop will explore the extent to which a basic function that hitherto has been assigned to the welfare state – the function of social reproduction – can serve as an analytical site to explore the interconnections between these seemingly complex, intersecting and multiple dimensions of European crisis.

The workshop, then, proposes to return to what classical welfare state research considered to be an essential structural property of the welfare state (Wilensky, 1975; Therborn, 1987). The basic argument is that, as (post-) industrial capitalism develops, ‘traditional’ communal and extended family reproductive networks are undermined and need to be replaced by public welfare provision. This insight was subsequently given further breadth, depth, ontological subtlety, and a more critical edge by feminist research (e.g. Pateman, 1988; Orloff, 1996). Here questions were raised over the extent to which the welfare state overcame traditional patriarchal structures and the extent to which it instead mediated between, and helped co-constitute, different forms of stratification in the realms of the family, market and the state. Nevertheless, the emancipatory potential of the welfare state continued to be explored (e.g. Sainsbury, 1996).

From such analytical considerations, deeper issues about the (post?) crisis landscape in Europe can be explored. It can reasonably be argued that social policy developments in Europe in the two decades leading up to the crisis were indeed about addressing reproductive requirements generated by a modernisation agenda and attempting to mainstream feminist critiques of the ‘male-breadwinner model’ with the neo-liberal economic flexibility agenda. Crucial in this regard was the image of an ‘adult worker model’ (Giuliani and Lewis, 2005). Increased social expenditure in southern Europe was above all in traditional reproductive areas in a rather narrow sense, such as childcare provision (Rhodes, 2002: 312-13). The concern of the Lisbon Agenda with increased labour market participation rates was intimately intertwined with the reproductive question of a prospective transition to the ‘adult worker’ model.

From such a perspective, a central working-hypothesis for the workshop to address is as follows:

Attempts to retrench social policy through austerity are interfering with structural reproductive necessities, and are likely to continue to generate profound crisis tendencies. Prima facie evidence for its plausibility can be found in the dramatic increase of suicides, infectious diseases and HIV (Karanikolos et al, 2013; Bergiannaki and Dimitrakopoulos, 2014) and the increased strains of the attenuated extended family networks in southern Europe as families move back home to retired parents and grand-parents in order to economically manage (e.g. Salido, Carabana & Torrejon, 2012). These manifestations and strains condition the political reactions to migration, which, however, also plays a critical role in Europe’s political economy of reproduction

The workshop proposes to explore this hypothesis with reference to the following questions:

· Does research affirm that there is a reproductive dimension to the ‘post’-crisis landscape?

· How does state-of-the-art research address the question of reproductive crisis, and is it adequate?

· How should the emergent properties of the reproductive crisis be conceptualised?

· What are the implications of the answers to the aforementioned for the merit of current modes of crisis management and alternatives to these?

Attendance is open to all, although please register in advance. Email Sam Warner: [log in to unmask]

Itinerary

Friday June 03

Introduction

· Magnus Ryner (King’s College London)

· Paul Lewis/David Bailey (University of Birmingham)

Welfare and the Political Economy of Reproduction in the Post(?)-Crisis Landscape

· Roberta Guerrina (University of Surrey)

· Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester)

Saturday 04 June

The Crisis of the Welfare State: Perspectives from the Periphery

· Monica Clua-Losada (University of Texas)

· Serena Romano (University of Naples)

Steady She Goes? Work, Reproduction and Welfare in a Reformed Modell Deutschland

· Douglas Voigt (King’s College London)

· Nina Süsse (King’s College and the Max Planck Institute, Cologne)

Conclusions

· Johan Hassel (Global Utmaning) (TBC)