ABSTRACT
Regardless of the ‘world of Welfare’ in which it functions – to use the term coined by Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) – the state has, during a large part of the twentieth century, come to play an essential role in the handling of welfare in liberal democracies. This does not mean that its role amounts to exercising a monopoly. Providing a counterweight to the market in the social-democratic ‘compromise’, the Welfare State often emerges, in the political thought of the majority of the post-war centre-left, as the most reliable guarantor of the common good. The ‘social’ (Donzelot 1984) is then considered as the best way to reinforce this idea. The ‘welfare backlash’(Merrien 2005: 253) which marked the 1980s and 1990s has reversed this belief. Sustaining and feeding on the premise of a ‘crisis’ of the Fordist Welfare State, this backlash constituted, above all, an ideological attack on an institution accused of ‘inefficiency’ to which there was only one possible solution: retrenchment. Particularly widespread in Great Britain during the Thatcher years, this offensive takes as its model the ideal of the ‘Hollow State’
(Peters 1993). It is given substance in various movements running concurrently: a wave of privatizations affecting certain public services, liberalization leading to the fragmentation of welfare between several bodies (private and ‘para-public’) deregulation of the Social through the emergence of internal markets in some public services, and the abandonment of universalism in favour of a better targeted, residual social assistance. Nevertheless, as Colin Crouch (Crouch 2004: 103) remarks, the free market economy thus promoted by neoliberalism does not exist in the state of nature. The apparent withdrawal of the British Welfare State is only made possible by strengthening the power of a centralized state in order to guarantee the best framework for privatization and the commodification of welfare(see Gamble 1988).
