Civil Society Watch

Until very recently, there had been a violent discussion going on in all highly developed industrial societies on the limits of the welfare state, and even today the topic plays an important role in the scientific and political debate in Western Europe -- and North America. Ironically, this debate was started in the early 1960s ( M. Friedman, F.A. Hayek) and resumed with special vehemence in the 1970s ( Wilbur J. Cohen / M. Friedman, J.M. Buchanan, etc.) in a country which, compared with the standard of social welfare in, e.g., Sweden or Germany, might perhaps be counted among the "underdeveloped" welfare states: the United States. In the course of this debate it became fashionable among conservative politicians all over the world to conjure up the ruinous consequences of the welfare state for the freedom of the individual as well as for the functioning of the economy. The "deterring example" referred to was, in the first phase, Sweden, but soon other countries with (then) social democratic governments such as Great Britain, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Austria followed.

 

Solidarity as a voluntary act of recognizing others as deserving one's esteem, care and support is possible in a secular society where the responsibility to help is not always already commanded by religion, tradition, or status (noblesse oblige). Yet, solidarity seems to be almost impossible in a society based on contractual relations governed (a) by the principle pacta sunt servanda and (b) by the idea of liberty that establishes a system of limited irresponsibility (the limits being contracts and some obligations for "dependents"). That is why societies that we have come to regard as modern do not rely on social solidarity but rather on some kind of insurance system or welfare regime that externalizes the costs of the market economy by means of a mixture of risk distribution, economic compensation, poor relief, and social control. Typical of these welfare regimes are the following traits:

The United States, as has been said for at least 100 years, is different from Europe. And it has been different, it has been said over and over again, because of the importance of the doctrine of laissez faire in the United States. This has been a society in which mobility and expansion (perhaps we could call it the frontier thesis in many ways) have played the role that politics and political negotiation and conflict have played in European societies. So, as it has often been noted, even labor in the United States never had an estate consciousness; rarely, in fact, has the labor force or the working class in the United States, been the same people for more than a generation or two. And, consequently, the sorts of democratic politics that evolved in Western Europe have never evolved in the same way here.