ABSTRACT
The images of French routiers, German miners or Belgian automobile-workers striking to preserve their jobs and social guarantees are likely to be remembered as the most visible symbols of that struggle around welfare reform which has been dominating Europe’s political landscape in the course of the last decade. Unfortunately the international media have been paying much less attention to other, less vocal protagonists of the same scene, somewhat crowded in its background: Neapolitan streetchildren living in conditions of extreme poverty; legions of Spanish youngsters with little prospect of finding a job; forgotten neighbourhoods in the peripheries of Athens, Lisbon or Palermo where the state (let alone a welfare state) is only a vague and distant presence. Yet these images are extremely relevant for a full understanding of the stakes surrounding welfare reform in Europe today. And Southern Europe is perhaps the area where these stakes are greater. Here reforming and modernising the welfare state is not just a matter of responding to demographic challenges or globalisation and meeting the new constraints of EMU, but a crucial step towards improving the life chances of millions of ‘outsiders’, who still remain to a large extent beyond the social reach of the state.
