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This chapter begins with a discussion of the reform capacity of the semi-sovereign European welfare state. It then discusses employment as the most important measure for judging the sustainability of the welfare state and the success of social and economic policy, regime-specific reform agendas, and the relative success of the European employment strategy.

The chapter presents, in synthesis form, some key elements of what is now understood about welfare regimes, their respective pathologies of development, their current paths of reform, and the challenges that still confront them. The first section examines welfare state performance thematically, focusing on employment, the scale and shape of social security systems, and distributive outcomes. The second section takes Europe’s four welfare regimes (those of Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Southern Europe) and analyses their respective strengths and vulnerabilities. The conclusion considers where the literature on welfare states is likely to go in the future.

This chapter begins with a review of the challenges faced by European welfare states in the 1990s and the solutions to these challenges. It then discusses how changes in welfare states can be analysed; changes to the cultural and structural basis of citizenship; and new approaches to social policy and citizenship. The chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to improve, from a comparative perspective, our understanding of the causes and effects behind the changing relationships between social policy, marginalisation, and citizenship. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter provides an overview of the tradition of citizenship within the context of a number of trends in European welfare states, which have impact on gendered citizenship. These trends are reviewed in relation to four main issues: the pressures for residualisation of social rights; the relationship between social rights and obligations and the ‘remodification’ of labour through which the ability to uphold a socially acceptable standard of living is tied closely to labour market participation; the implications of this remodification for the recognition of care as an expression of citizenship responsibility; and supra-national citizenship, in particular with reference to the European Union (EU) and social rights and the treatment of ‘outsiders’. The chapter begins by elaborating on the concept and on the relationship between citizenship and the welfare state. It then clarifies how the concept of citizenship serves to point out the important qualitative changes in welfare policies, and how the notion of citizenship and its transformation may be applied to identify and to address the core contemporary challenges to welfare states.

This chapter discusses the change in the cultural construct of the citizen of European welfare states, which can be characterised as a shift from a notion of citizenship as passive towards a model of active citizenship. The main features of ‘active citizenship’ include autonomy, self-responsibility, flexibility, geographical mobility, a professional education, and the ability to engage in civil society to fulfil one's own interests. In the field of policies towards family and care, two different approaches to active citizenship are relevant. In the first approach, the main focus is on the integration of a higher proportion of women into waged work. The second approach is based on the promotion of informal care in the framework of the family and the introduction of a new social right to care. Both approaches have been further developed in different welfare regimes, and in part coexist within the same ones.

This chapter explores the unique immigration-policy model that was adopted in Israel as a contribution to the understanding of the connection between social and immigration policies in European welfare states. The discussion uses an institutional perspective to present a detailed study that explains the emergence and endurance of the categorical welfare system of Israeli immigrants. It also analyses the implications of this categorical system for immigrants and other sectors of Israeli society. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the relevance of the Israeli case for European welfare states.

The European labour market is currently experiencing radical changes that challenge the institution of the European welfare state. A new international division of labour is creating new opportunities including new threats for the European labour force. As a new international division of labour and new technologies are finding dominance, employees of the old manufacturing industries are becoming increasingly displaced and substituted. Knowledge workers and service workers are replacing conventional white-collar workers. Several young workers do not look at regular jobs as something rewarding but instead take advantage of new opportunities to become ‘free agents’ and self-employed and engage in the networking of the new economy. Transnational corporations also are having a profound impact on the location of production and the distribution of wealth. They are the main actors behind internationalisation and the new global division of labour. New powerful social dynamics are becoming prominent, created by the growing significance of locality and competence of the labour force, the potential impact of global migration trends, and an increasing political awareness of the role of social capital as a condition for industrial innovation and social inclusion. This chapter discusses the future of some of the significant features of the European Union (EU) labour market. It also examines the process of internationalisation and the fundamental social and political dynamics of change that are affecting the European firms and wage-earners including European welfare states.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the authors. It reviews the preceding discussions on the European welfare states and the changes they are undergoing. The chapter argues that ‘active citizenship’ is a way to summarise the new face of welfare. This notion opens new potentials as well as new threats for social security. It may lead to increasing polarisation between the weak and the strong, but this is not inevitable. It is a new battlefield that cannot be evaluated mechanically using the institutional criteria of the past.

This chapter compares the Europe 2020 strategy with the Lisbon strategy from 2000. It shows how the intentions behind the Lisbon strategy to promote knowledge-based economic growth with more social cohesion were given after only five years and how the Open Method of Coordination was too soft for implementing the intentions behind the strategy. The weaknesses that made the Lisbon strategy insufficient as scaffolding for the Euro-collaboration remain in the Europe 2020 strategy, and now, only a movement towards a European Economic and Social Union, with strong focus upon more social and more regional cohesion, can save the European project. But this would require a kind of leadership, common vision and capacity to build democratic support currently missing in Europe.

This chapter reviews the central theoretical perspectives on childcare, gender, and social citizenship, and childcare as a social right of parents. It then discusses the main components of the childcare policy packages of the nine European welfare states, and parents' take-up and use of the childcare-related rights available. The chapter returns to the development of childcare-related social rights and their importance for the gendered differentiation of access to social and economic citizenship. It is clear that childcare is increasingly ‘going public’ in all Western European countries. Childcare policies may serve to familise or defamilise childcare and to commodify or decommodify the labour of the parents. The chapter explains the three sets of childcare-related policy measures: (1) leave arrangements for parents, (2) state-subsidised/approved childcare-service provision for children under school age, and (3) cash benefits for childcare. The gendering of citizenship is related to the renegotiation and redistribution of childcare responsibilities.

The change in the labour market is seen as one of the most serious threats to the economic sustainability of European welfare states, and to the realization of the ideal ‘full citizenship’ among their citizens. Technological change and globalisation have resulted in the decline of labour market fortunes for the lower-skilled and the vulnerable segments of the labour force. This has led to social marginalisation and to a barrier in economic growth. Inflexible labour markets with high minimum wages mean that unemployment becomes structural so that an economic upturn leads to increased competition for skilled labour and thus to inflation rather than significantly reduced unemployment. This book presents some contributions to building more detailed comparative knowledge based on new and complex approaches which focus on citizenship, welfare arrangements, marginalisation as a multidimensional phenomenon and the need to differentiate the dimensions of gender, age, values and ethnicity when analysing marginalisation and citizenship. The aims of this book is: to contribute to the theoretical clarification of the key concepts of changing labour markets, citizenship, welfare policies and marginalisation; to take first steps towards applying such a framework to illuminate how European welfare states have handled similar problems through policies that give different emphasis on social rights and citizenship; and to discuss conditions and new directions of change by contributing to an understanding of the interplay of external challenges, institutions and agency in this policy field. In this introduction, the concepts of changing labour markets and welfare policies, including the concepts of marginalisation and citizenship are clarified and defined first before outlining the themes of the succeeding chapters.

This chapter shows how the findings of the book contribute to the further development of the academic discussions on ‘care’. Several chapters emphasise the role of cultural values and gender relations in explaining national specificity in the care arrangement. It also shows how the interpretation of activities involved in bringing up children and providing care and of the symbolic production of family relationships has been modernised. It is remarkable that the increase in life expectancy and the change in demographic structure have led to an unexpectedly rapid restructuring of elderly care in several countries. The populations in European welfare states uses extensively not only the services but also the institutional instruments and the resources for encouraging semi-formal care work.

This chapter examines the impact of globalization on the European welfare state. It discusses the forces of factor price convergence; gains from trade and specialization; and rigid wages and the welfare state. It argues that the welfare state must be improved by making its redistributive activities compatible with wage flexibility. It describes Activating Social Assistance, a watertight new polder system that both respects the social aims of the European welfare state and the needs of a market economy struggling against the international low-wage competition brought about by globalization.

The European welfare states have the most extensive systems of social protection in the world. In Europe, the social insurance schemes provide protection against unemployment, sickness, invalidity, and old age. Despite the protection provided by social schemes, poverty has never disappeared, and means-tested minimum income protection (MIP) has remained a necessity. In several European countries, large population groups receive MIP benefits. In Ireland and the United Kingdom, more than twenty percent of older persons depended in MIP in 2007. In the same year in Germany, more than ten percent of the adult working-age population were dependent on MIP benefits. These figures show that MIP systems include sizeable proportions of the population, despite the fact that they are considered the residual last safety net that serves only in cases of need, when people's rights to all other kinds of social benefits are exhausted or do not suffice to guarantee a social minimum. This book provides a comprehensive and recent comparative assessment of the MIP systems in seventeen European countries from the year 1992 to 2010. This book is a result of a research project that was funded by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung and the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES) in Germany. The data and the analyses provided in this book are based on the newly developed project database on MIP systems that is available to the public for scientific use.