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Since the 1990s, European welfare states have undergone substantial changes regarding their objectives, areas of intervention and instruments of use. There has been an increasing move towards the prioritisation of the involvement of citizens and the participation of civil society. This book focuses on the altered (powerful) conditions for encounters between citizens and welfare workers. It uses the concept of soft power, which, inter alia, allows for the investigations of the ways in which individuals manipulate each other in an effort to achieve their desired goals. The first part of the book discusses extracts from state-of-the-art research on professions and expertise, and the perception of power that guides the analyses. It also discusses the overall theoretical positioning when analysing encounters between welfare workers and citizens as co-productive and interactionist. The second part presents analyses to show how a bureaucratic context affects the encounter between administrators and clients, and how a market context affects the encounter between service providers and consumers/customers. The analysis of how a psychology-inspired context affects the encounter between coaches and coaches is also provided. All three contexts are to be perceived as Weberian ideal types, in other words, theoretical constructs based on observations of the real world. The concluding part of the book emphasises on the role of the principles of the bureaucracy, the norms from psychology, and the values of the market in the welfare encounter. Key points of the book are summarised in the conclusion.
, in order to understand the different paths that Mediterranean welfare states have taken in recent years, in addition to the economic circumstances and international position, the nation-specific political tensions should also be taken into account. Characteristics of the southern welfare-state syndrome According to Ferrera (1996), all the southern European welfare states long shared, and partly still share, a ‘sociopolitical etiquette’ that distinguishes them from other corporatist European countries such as Germany, France or Austria, based on ‘status
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has written extensively on the European Union.
This is the only in-depth account of his project. Published now in a second
edition to coincide with the celebration of his ninetieth birthday, a new
preface considers Habermas’s writings on the eurozone and refugee crises,
populism and Brexit, and the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.
Placing an
emphasis on the conception of the EU that informs Habermas’s political
prescriptions, the book is divided into two main parts. The first considers the
unfolding of 'social modernity' at the level of the EU. Among the
subjects covered are Habermas's concept of juridification, the
latter's affinities with integration theories such as neofunctionalism, and
the application of Habermas's democratic theory to the EU. The second part
addresses 'cultural modernity' in Europe – 'Europessimism'
is argued to be a subset of the broader cultural pessimism that assailed the
project of modernity in the late twentieth century, and with renewed intensity
in the years since 9/11.
Interdisciplinary in approach, this book engages
with European/EU studies, critical theory, political theory, international
relations, intellectual history, comparative literature, and philosophy. Concise
and clearly written, it will be of interest to students, scholars and
professionals with an interest in these disciplines, as well as to a broader
readership concerned with the future of Europe
’ circumstances, freelancers are precarious due to their structural dependency on the flow of interchangeable opportunities and/or badly paid jobs. When this flow stutters, they are left with nothing, especially if they are not lucky enough to be residents of one of the privileged European welfare states, like Germany, with its still-functioning safety nets. But this exception only confirms a universal law: that precarity is a long-term consequence of the general individualisation of responsibility for securing potential projects and future employment. Under neoliberal
Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.
their welfare clients that reproduces axes of exclusion and inclusion through mundane everyday interactions. Such tension between welfare and discipline calls for specific investigations of the encounters between refugees and the welfare states of Northern Europe. Northern European welfare states are known for their efficiency and the support that their national as well as local institutions of government enjoy among citizens (Fitzgerald and Wolak, 2014).4 A strong claim to bureaucratic efficiency, either imagined or real, is an important characteristic that sets
elevated the profile and influence of the epistemic research communities across the European Union and led to the development of a school of thinking which took ‘the birth of a child as a starting point’ in the re-design of social care arrangements in modern European welfare states (Kamerman and Moss, 2009b:260). This chapter highlights that the influence of the Swedish dual-earner and dual-carer model of fatherhood and parenting in the EU remained diluted by neo-liberal welfare ideologies and by conservative legacies of traditional patriarchal familism, leading to
. Thane (eds), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880–1950 (London, 1991); Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood; J. Lewis (ed.), Women’s Welfare, Women’s Rights (London, 1983); S. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (New York, 1993); R. Fuchs, ‘Morality and poverty: public welfare for mothers in Paris, 1870–1900’, French History, 2:3 (Sept., 1988), 288–311; S. Michael, and S. Koven, ‘Womanly duties: maternalist politics and the origins of the welfare Introduction 9
1 Introduction Since the 1990s, European welfare states have undergone substantial changes regarding their objectives, areas of intervention and instruments of use (Bonoli and Natali 2012; Jenson 2012). Throughout the past three decades, there has been an increasing move away from a more classical understanding of government (hierarchical, top-down politics) to governance (cooperative, bottom-up politics), in other words a move towards the prioritisation of the involvement of citizens and the participation of civil society (Brugnoli and Colombo 2012: xi). This