ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the actualisations systemic potential causes of inequality. It focuses on young people across Europe with regard to welfare provision and it deals with welfare regimes. The chapter also discusses how austerity measures have dismantled the compensating potentials and thus weakened many young people in the sense of their potential to assert themselves individually. The welfare model has been tailored for well-paid industrial workers with lifetime employment capable of paying into the social security funds and thereby safeguarding both their own and their entire family's situation. The model also includes a concern for solidarity with the disadvantaged in society; however, from a conservative basis. The social democratic welfare regime with universalist institutions like public housing has made it difficult for the concept of social exclusion to take hold. The existence of social exclusion is contrary to its fundamental principles. A general welfare based on citizenship makes it quite unthinkable. Any 'miserables', as in the conservative sense.
